Ansley Foxwell Murphy     Astral Wreaks Tis the season to write things off, and it seems that we just may have approached millennium. Whether you've been having all-too lucid pedophilic dreams or the desire to lop off your testicles and move to sunny California, it's not your fault. Really. The general consensus as of late has paved the American way, scrounged for that crumpled dollar bill and thrust it into outer space. And now the buck is nestled safely within the comet, the lunar eclipse, or the full moon. And if you wait until the 16th, you can even attribute your psychoses to Mars going retrograde in motion. Why? Because it's a symbol of this melting-pot of virtues we call home, where nothing is anybody's fault and where you're never at risk of becoming a suicide statistic if you can blame someone else. And I'm as much of a sucker as you. So I thought I might take this galactic opportunity to do a little spring cleaning of my overzealous feminine neuroses. Even though my horoscope tells me that this month a neutral palette should make me more approachable, I have some not-so-neutral winter baggage to unpack. But it's not my fault. The moon spooled the thread, Mars found a needle, and Hale-Bopp told me to go make him a sweater. It was a lusty confrontation, and since I'm not much into preserving my body parts in formaldehyde (pre-mass suicide), I thought I might search for the astral seam that binds everything I plan on throwing out. Rest assured that if being neutral is what will make me approachable, I could easily resign myself to leprosy and create my own cult, with celestially-licensed doctrines of "Things That Exist but Shouldn't." But there just isn't enough room for that. And so for the first item marked for the Goodwill pile: Women who go to class in hopes of becoming rock stars. For some reason I thought the urge to primp before the eager minds of fellow classmates fell by the wayside with cootie-catchers, but apparently I've been mistaken. I missed the advice in YM that said this was hip for spring, so I feel confident in wagging my unpolished nail at you all. Save brushing your tresses for the ladies room so that when you do become a star, we won't scoff at how much you worked at it. Yeah, okay, I love your new lipstick, uh-huh, looks great; why don't you apply it once more so this time I can really see it shimmer? Next on my list is the use of the word stellar as a synonym for cool, killer, awesome, what have you. Stellar used to be a really good word. I really liked throwing the adjective into the most unpredictable sentence of a conversation and feeling pretty fucking good about it. It wasn't about aligning our earthly existence with the stars, it just really worked as a sarcastic synonym for cool. Now using it has become such a chafe. Finally (because after all this is only a column), I need to confront that which has recently kicked over my internal bucket of calm: fashion's stamp of approval on lime green. Granted, it's a little early to be spring cleaning one of the tenets of spring apparel, but as I've mentioned, I'm more approachable with a neutral palette. Leo told me so. I guess that would explain why I recently had to abandon my shopping attempts because more than a few taut bodices were graced with a color the shade I associate with bile. What's so wrong with red or blue or even periwinkle? But they say it looks good with black. Anything looks good with black. They call it "mint." I call it "pee-when-you've-taken-your-vitamins." So I'll just be dropping these things off for consignment so that we can close the book on Mr. Bopp and tell him he did a damn fine job of weaving all this nonsense into his little cosmic scheme. Because I think that although he and his friends have been passed a lot of bucks, somehow we've been swindled out of our marbles.

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