All het up and can't sleep

For two weeks now, my horoscope in Astrobarry has been telling me that I'm too good at hiding my feelings and desires, too good at playing it cool, and that the risk is that the object of my affections won't know how I feel, and that will eliminate even the possibility of anything more happening. For two weeks now, he's been telling me to be a bit more direct, although not pushy, and even if I have been knocked back before, to re-propose to the object of my affections the benefit to them that might accrue if we were to get a little closer, because he mind have changed his mind.

And then last week when out at lunch with one of the candidates, I got a fortune cookie that said, "Someone is interested in you. Keep your eyes open."

So, the stars and the cookies are all full of promise of possibility, interested parties lurking out there unaware and undecided. Parties that might not actually flatly turn me down if I were to play things a little less cool and let them know that maybe, you know, if they were interested, it might be the case that I might also be interested.

This possibility is throwing me all in a tizz. First, I don't really have an object of affection. I have crushes, sure, everyone has crushes. Half of them are Hollywood movie stars so I probably won't get to avow my love to them during this particular phase of the moon that's supposed to increase my odds of a positive response. Lots of them are married so the crush never even gets off the ground, because I don't do married guys and I don't do polyamory. Married guys don't even get into the consideration set. And the rest of them all are really, inappropriately, beyond-cougar-like too young. Really.* Although they're the ones that come to mind when Astrobarry says I should start declaring love and demonstrating affections and desires.

I can't. The youngsters are all just manifestations of some phase I'm going through, right? These crushes are, more than usual, just manufactured inside my head. Right? There's no possibility that Astrobarry's advice is good advice, because what would happen is I would just humiliate myself. Right? Because even though I feel young at heart and like I maybe could still pass for in my 30's somewhere, which even that is too old, I'm probably fooling myself and come across perfectly clearly as a 45-year old, wrinkly, damaged, older woman. Who was alive when Kennedy was assassinated and remembers the moon landing. Actually risking some more overt gesture of something would just be setting myself up for humiliation. Right? I have to wait until I find someone single and interesting and age-appropriate, so that doesn't happen. So the horoscopes mean nothing. Nothing needs to be done. No possibilities are actually out there in the offing right now. The risk is still too great and the crushes are still too imaginary.

Or is this challenge designed to make me feel this very discomfort? The "maybe" feeling. I've been just assuming, since the big Broken Heart, that I'm too old for anyone to actually be attracted to, that I'm out of the game. You know, or that the damaged wrecks left out there are too desperate and broken themselves to be crush-worthy, much less worth going after or building something with. Crushes are not predation - getting something together with someone desperate whom you don't like does not count in this particular moon phase. Astrobarry is talking about something else, and maybe even if I don't make some sort of ultra-risky and embarrassing move on one of those poor creatures just going about minding his own business, maybe the lesson of this is to get this "maybe" feeling back in my life. So that when an appropriate and actually viable crush comes along, I might be able to move then. I might not play it so cool that the ships just pass in the night and never know the possibility of what might have been.

Right? It's a lesson for the future?

*Creepiness ratio, for reference: (your age/2)+7