It’s actually not Mercury retrograde’s fault, your life is just fucked up

By Alexandra Holyk

Mercury is currently in retrograde, so people think it’s acceptable to blame everything from a bad grade on their midterm to their cuffing-season boo breaking up with them on a rock floating in the sky.

According to RetrogradeRuinsLive.com, an astrological website that specializes in analyzing the planetary phenomenon, retrograde is when Mercury appears to move backwards as it passes Earth in its orbit. Mercury is the planet of communication, so in turn, technology is supposedly affected during this time.

With this in mind, the Toronto Transit Conspiracy Theorists (TTCT) said they believe that TTC delays are a result of Mercury retrograde messing with the transit system and have nothing to do with the volume of people during rush hour.

“Mercury is orbiting backwards and so is the subway. The backlog of people at Bloor-Yonge this morning at 8 a.m. was ridiculous,” said TTCT representative, Richard Shakey.

Shakey refused to acknowledge the fact that the TTC is delayed most of the time.

Just because Mercury may appear to go backwards in its orbit, astrology professor Isaac Zode said it has no correlation to people going “backwards in life.”

Mercury is only in retrograde for a few weeks about three times a year, but Zode said students complain to him about their lives every day, year-round. “Perhaps people are struggling to comprehend that maybe their own choices are ruining their lives, not a planet.”

Despite having written her midterm before Mercury retrograde, third-year psychology student Unda Prepeard says she blames the retrograde for the mark she received.

“Even though I was fully mentally and physically unprepared for my exam, it’s Mercury’s fault I got 48.67 per cent,” Prepeard said.

Similarly, Chad-Kyle Dudewicz, a second-year RTA sport media student, is described by his friends as someone who never takes responsibility for his own actions.

“Sure, I cheated on my girlfriend when I was at a party that she wasn’t invited to. And sure, it was with one of my girlfriend’s friends who posted a picture of me on her Snapchat story that night. But retrograde makes you do some fucked up shit that you have no control over whatsoever,” Dudewicz said. 

Dudewicz’s ex-girlfriend, first-year RTA student Liza Pawnyum, said that Dudewicz regularly blames his actions on astrological occurrences and his zodiac sign’s tendencies.

“When I broke up with him, he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘It’s not you, it’s Mercury retrograde in Scorpio and its effect on my Scorpio moon,’” Pawnyum said.

Mercury is in retrograde until Nov. 20 and Zode said he expects to hear more complaints than ever from students about how fucked up their lives are because of a planet’s orbit.

“I really think that at this point, students will blame their problems on anything and everything but themselves,” Zode said.