“I’m not at all psychic. Any astrologer who says they’re psychic you must run away from, because it means they don’t want to do the math.”

This is one of the first things astrologer and writer Susan Miller says to me, and I find it simultaneously hopeful and disheartening. I gave up wishing for psychic powers at 13, around the time I stopped collecting X-Men comics. Ever since, I’ve secretly hoped astrology would be my way into the world of mystics, that if I studied hard enough I could enroll at Hogwarts without any innate ability. But no one told me there’d be math on the entrance exam.

Miller is one of the world’s foremost astrologers. Millions of followers eagerly anticipate her monthly horoscope readings—on June 1, 10 million people visited her website, AstrologyZone.com, in a single hour. Her column is carried not just by Vogue Japan, but by Japan’s three biggest cell phone companies: a much surer sign of her domination of the astrology market in Asia.

The roots of my understanding of astrology lie in the many tie-dyed T-shirts and handmade Guatemalan wool sweaters I once owned. In my late twenties, I feared my Saturn returns. (That dreaded moment when… Saturn… returns?) I have always assumed all Virgos were like my ex-boyfriend, who alphabetized not only his books, but also his spice rack. But I can’t tell you what the constellation Virgo looks like, let alone why it makes you OCD. I’m not alone. When it comes to astrology, many believers (from my brother on up to Nancy Reagan) combine interest with ignorance—a true definition of blind faith. And there are lots of us out there. According to a 2009 Pew poll, 25 percent of Americans believe in astrology, and 71 percent don’t. That other 4 percent? They’re Pisces, who can never make up their damn minds about anything.

All this adds up to opportunity. The next best thing to being psychic is simply knowing more than someone else, which is why, last August, Miller and I crammed ourselves into a small café, between a shrieking espresso machine and a power-suited businesswoman on her lunch hour.

Hogwarts, this isn’t.

Step One: Plot the Stars

Performing a reading begins with the basics: figuring out your sign—or, really, your signs. There are 12 signs to the zodiac, which correspond to 12 constellations. But those 12 weren’t chosen randomly.

“I used to think the constellations were all over the place until I studied astrology,” Miller says. “They’re at a 23-degree angle. They go around like a belt, like Earth has an ornate belt.”

Miller explains that this belt, called “the ecliptic,” is the apparent path of the sun over the course of a year. The zodiac only deals with constellations inside this orbit, which is why no one is a Southern Cross or an Orion. It takes about a month for the sun to go through each constellation, hence your sun sign: the sign the sun was in on the date of your birth. This is what people mean when they wink at you in a bar and say, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?”

But it’s just one of your signs.

Miller asks me when and where I was born. She wants precision, down to the minute. I came prepared for this.

“Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.,” I tell her. “3:15 a.m.”

“We want to know the exact minute so we can convert everyone to Greenwich Mean Time, England,” she explains. “So it was fair, my mother would always say.” (Miller learned astrology from her mother, while bedridden as a teen due to a congenital illness.)

This information allows us to reconstruct the position of the stars at the exact moment of my birth. Basically, we are redesigning the belt Earth was wearing at the moment I was born. Your sun sign is the one that would be hanging over Earth’s junk, while your rising sign is on the horizon, or approximately Earth’s left hip. The difference between rising and sun? In simple terms, your sun sign is your outward persona; your rising is your inner self. To get a good prediction from a general horoscope, Miller recommends reading both signs, and meshing the two. If you’re born at the beginning or the end of your sign, you may also have strong influences from the sign before or after, so look at those, also.

Miller pulls out a battered-looking paperback, the kind without a real binding. It’s called The Ephemeris, a title that feels mystical enough to send a tingle down my spine. Now we’re getting somewhere.

She opens it up to reveal pages upon pages of tables: numbers, dates, esoteric symbols. Back in the day, this text is how they recreated the belt. (In this case, “back in the day” means from about 2000 B.C. until the mid-’80s.) It’s this data that ensured each astrologer did not have to do their own astronomical observations, and that they were all working from the same baseline information. Miller lets me look at it long enough for my eyes to glaze over while she talks about logarithms. Then she pulls out her laptop. Nowadays, we have software that handles all the astrological calculations. Miller downloads her astronomical data from N.A.S.A. and plugs it into her laptop. I type in my birth information, the spinning ball of death appears for a moment, and the computer spits out its result: My sun sign is Cancer, my rising is Gemini.

“Oh little Cancer, wonderful. You’re ruled by the moon.”

I bristle when she says this, because I know what’s coming. Sure enough, she goes on to tell me I’m moody, but also perceptive. Gemini is the scribe. It makes me a writer. Gemini is an important sign in Miller’s life too—we have that in common.

Step Two: Make a Chart

Locating the stars is only the beginning of an astrological reading. Most of astrology is based on the position of the planets relative to your sign. It’s nearly impossible to keep it all straight in your head, so astrologers make charts: circles that are divided into the 12 houses. Each house corresponds to a portion of the ecliptic, and has a number, an associated sign, and characteristics. Because the stars move all the time, every day is unique.

When Miller got her start, she used The Ephemeris to make each day’s chart. Every planet would be laboriously looked up, and its coordinates plotted. To complete her monthly column meant charting a month’s worth of points and assessing what they meant as a whole, as well as what the progression over time meant. Miller adapted quickly to both computers and the internet, starting her first website in the early ‘90s, while simultaneously providing astrological content for Time Warner.

“If I write about the future, I should be about the future,” she says.

She continues plugging away on her laptop, then turns her laptop to show me my chart for the day. It looks like a simplified roulette wheel with a handful of Lucky Charms tossed on it. These symbols represent the planets and constellations, and you’ve probably seen them tattooed on nouveau-hippie frat boys. We begin looking for geometric shapes.

“Squares are obstacles,” Miller says, pointing to a place where the lines between the planets form 90-degree angles. This means problems. The worst possible formation is known as a Cardinal Cross: four planets, each at 90 degrees from another, one in each element, all out to fuck you. If you had a rough August, this is why: because four planets ended up sitting in the houses of Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn, in a 90-degree face-off.

Why is this so bad? Because those four signs are all cardinal. Miller explains that we can divide the 12 signs of the zodiac in two ways: by element (Cancer is water, etc.) or by modality (cardinal, fixed, or mutable). If you put the zodiac in order, and clump them in threes, the first of each clump is a cardinal sign, the second is fixed, the third is mutable. Cardinal signs, as befits starting points, are all about action. Fixed signs, being in the middle, are the most persistent or stubborn. And mutables, at the end, are changeable and resourceful. So a Cardinal Cross means all of the active signs are in the shit at the same time. This is probably why in August, I could count my bank balance on my fingers and toes.

Miller taps two planets that are directly opposite one another, forming a straight line that cuts through the center of the chart. “Opposition can be a tug of war, or it can be a chance for two halves of the apple to come together. But it always involves some kind of compromise, a blending of energies.”

She takes my hand and traces a triangle between three of the Lucky Charms. “A trion, the little triangles? They’re good. That’s perfect harmony, 120 degrees.” These are planets working together in your favor.

Finally, she maps out something like an asterisk. “Sextiles—those are the little star things—those are 60 degrees, and that’s an opportunity, but you have to do something.”

All right, I think. I’m getting this. Sure, there was a moment where I forgot if the planets moved into signs or the signs moved past the planets, or both, but this seems easy. Just look for shapes! How hard can it be?

That’s when Miller clicks a few more buttons on her laptop. Suddenly, there are dozens of other symbols on the chart: asteroids, comets, midpoints, moons. Everything, she tells me, has meaning.

Step Three: Find the Story

What makes a good astrologer—and what makes Miller one of the best—is the ability to explain what it all means. So Mercury, planet of intelligence, is in opposition to Venus, planet of fertility. And one is the First House, the House of the Self, while the other is in the Seventh House, the House of Cooperation and Opposition. Great to know, but should I schedule a job interview that day or not?

Experience is key. A good astrologer keeps track of the skies, and of the world, and of the people they know. Long before they ever begin to make predictions, they learn what tends to happen when planets or houses or stars are in certain arrangements. They are like meteorologists, forecasting the weather based on accumulated data. Some might quibble that their data is equal parts bullshit and credulity, but from within, this is how the work of an astrologer is understood.

“Astrology is the study of cycles,” Miller tells me, right before we part ways. You have to look backwards to understand the current moment. And to explain it to someone else, you have to be able to make it a cohesive narrative.

For Miller, everything is alive. All her stories are in the present tense, and she performs them, performs herself, continually. Throughout our four-hour date, Miller marshals everything within reach to act out her stories, morphing books into hospital beds, fingers into people, and a distant vase into an unreachable telephone. She takes the same approach to astrology.

“When I sit down to write a column, I have these unruly little schoolchildren,” Miller says. “Like ‘Venus, stop kissing Mars! Uranus, stop running around the room. Pluto, stop trying to get out the window.’”

This is when I realize: I could do this. Yes, math is hard. (For me. My chart backs me up on this.) But astrologers are a lot like writers. Each takes a smattering of archetypes, a circumstance or two, and spits out a story—though the elements of Miller’s stories have been written light years away in the ink of nuclear fusion. This is why we read our horoscopes every month: Each one is a story written not just for you, but about you. And the best astrologers, like the best writers, are those whose stories make you want to believe.

The train from Chicago to New Orleans passes through Kankakee, Homewood, and Yazoo City; names that evoke images of wagon trains and episodes of Dr. Quinn. I don’t know most of this country.

Were I to draw a map, the Northeast would be ponderously detailed; Chicago would float in limbo; and California would consist of San Francisco and L.A. smooshed together between beaches and pot farms. The rest would be a mess, cartography by way of Cubism.

I’d like to say riding the train taught me something about this country; that my seatmate (probably, to ensure maximum movie potential, my elderly, black, female seatmate), told me about growing up on a farm in Yazoo City, or the first car to come to Homewood. But she slept most of the ride, and the only words we exchanged were a cordial “Have a safe trip,” when she got off at Jackson.

The train cut through towns at dawn and dusk. I saw dirt roads and business districts, stretched my legs in Memphis, and watched the moon rise through the snack car window. Sans context, without my mythical seatmate’s ur-narrative of rural childhood, the Mississippi—that long north-south axis of Americana—sprawled alongside me, meaningless.

Just the way I like it.

I don’t love trains because they teach me about America. I don’t love them because they connect me with a country I have never known. I love them because they disconnect me from everything else. When the train pulls out of the station, it’s like a plug being yanked from a socket. There is a moment of psychic tightening, as the invisible tether of responsibility pulls taught.

WAIT! I should be online! Connected! Accounta—

A silent snap, and I’m free.

* * *

Pop Quiz!

If you read the above carefully, absorbed each word, didn’t skim or skip a single line, you read 286 words (or 285.5, depending on how you count “accounta—”). Over the course of those 286 words, how many times did you check your email? Look at Facebook? Send a text?

Divide those two numbers, and you’ve got your attention index. Mine is measly. Even while editing my own writing, I got distracted 4 times, which means I can pay attention for an average of 71 words. That’s about as long as the chorus of your average pop song. Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” perhaps the current definition of pop song, comes in a little long at 81 words, and an uncountable number of auto-tuned noises. One imagines those extra words enable her to get across the post-modern Derridean influences she mentions so often. “Out in the club / and I’m sippin’ that bub / and you’re not gonna reach my telephone.” Take that, you hidebound structuralist motherfuckers.

According to a survey by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 4.1 percent of American adults have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Yet according to an informal survey of People In My House (PIMH), 100 percent of American adults claim to be “totally ADD” all the time. Don’t dismiss PIMH because it consists of three stoners and a mouse. I think they have a point.

Like money, attention is something we must pay. Perhaps the 4.1 percent of us recognized by the NIMH are simply those who exist below the attention poverty line. The rest of us have more, but rarely an inexhaustible supply. Our wallets bulge and thin depending on the day, and we use Adderall like a game show lifeline. By choice or accident of birth in the contemporary U.S.A., most of us are living far beyond our attention means. The blips and bleeps of our phones and computers, the necessity of working far from home, the number of people we know or, in the case of celebrities, feel like we know—we pay for all of it.

I am as profligate with attention as I am spendthrift with money. I am a freelance writer, which means I am constantly hunting for the next story, the next job. My necessary evil is networking—that vile word that calls up whitened teeth in bad suits, executives drinking expensive wine and orgiastially congratulating themselves. Also, I move constantly. In the past year, I’ve resided in three different places in New York City, three in Puerto Rico, one in New Jersey, and one in New Orleans. I’ve also gone on eight road trips, lasting between three days and two weeks, during all of which I’ve worked on my laptop, on my iPhone, and (in moments of true desperation) on paper. Currently, I’m packing to move back to New York. I might be the extreme end of the curve, but I’m not alone. According to a Census Bureau report in 1993 one in six Americans moved every year.

Focus is something I experience mostly via its absence. On a daily basis, I mine the furthest extents of my mind for a little bit more. When it comes to paying attention, I’m like that person on line at the grocery store, trying to buy toilet paper with pennies. I am a dry well, a clear-cut forest, an overdrawn checking account.

A long train ride is the equivalent of being in debtor’s prison. There is no internet, and for vast swaths of the country, no cell phone reception. Changes of scenery are limited. I went to the bathroom to put on pajamas and fart before bed. Around sunrise, snoring drove me to the lower level of the snack car, where my only company was the woman who sold coffee and the man with whom she was flirting. She called me “sugar” and “honey” and “baby,” all within a conversation that couldn’t have lasted a minute. I basked in refracted endearments while a sullen teenager wandered in, looking for a dark place to play her Nintendo DS. I watched an old woman walk a colicky baby back and forth through the cars; one full lap took about 10 minutes. That was the extent of my world, a limited set of choices as lulling (in its own way) as the rhythm of the wheels beneath me.

The train is a liberating K-hole, a moment of suspended animation where it’s entirely acceptable to not answer phone calls, not check your email, not speak to anyone, not go outside, not finish that proposal, not order new checks, not call your father, not work out, not shower, not change.

There are an endless number of things you can not do.

* * *

Some time in the night, the woman in front of me turned and tapped me on the knee.

“Do your sockets work?” she asked. Every seat in the train comes with a pair of electrical outlets, another way in which trains are infinitely superior to cars or planes. Except in this case, my outlet was dead. The entire car was without power.

I was seized with panic. Stalking electrical outlets is the closest I get to regularly hunting for sustenance. Access to electricity is a necessity in my life. I move through the world with a portable shackle, always looking for the next place to tether myself.

Then I realized that for a rare day, I didn’t need to plug in anything. Not even—or perhaps especially—myself. Let my computer die, my iPhone power down. The world wouldn’t end simply because I couldn’t read about it on Facebook.

So between Chicago and New Orleans, I read a book. It was a silly, poorly written piece of science fiction, but I read the entire thing from start to finish. I read my way through Kankakee, Homewood, and Yazoo City, from Illinois down through Tennessee and Mississippi. I took a few breaks: to nap, to start this essay. Mostly, however, I just read. Pages slowly drifted by as some passengers exited and others boarded.

For the first time in a long time, I never once stopped to question who a particular character was, or why they were calling their mother. I never needed to flip backwards to find the spot where my attention had drifted. With every page, it felt easier to keep my focus in one place. The lingering desire to respond—to my phone, to my email, to my surroundings—dissipated. Nineteen hours drifted by slowly. No, “slowly” isn’t the right word. “Leisurely.”

I’m no Luddite. By the time I landed in New Orleans, I was desperate—desperate—to check my email. Given the option, I have the internet close at hand 24/7, to keep up with friends splashed around the world, jobs with no physical location, and Lindsay Lohan’s every move. Which is why I need those places where I have no choice, to limit the lizard-brain that wants constant stimulation. The three, or four, or six hours it takes to traverse the country by plane simply aren’t enough to quiet the desire to multitask. For city-dwellers like me, there are few other moments in life when we are outside the option of cell phone or Wi-Fi service—an option that feels more and more like a requirement every day. Having your phone off is seen as a moral failure, an antisocial tendency that is suspect at best, if not a downright indication of psychosis. I live in fear of the day I get reception on the subway. I dream of the Orient Express, of Atlantic steamers, of camping trips in remote forests—places where my reserves of attention can be filled, so that I can return refreshed to Twitter and Facebook, the subway and CNN, all 14 of my magazine subscriptions and the innumerable blogs in my RSS feed.

I leapt off that train like a Vegas rookie, pockets bulging, ready to be fleeced. Without a doubt, I’ll soon come crawling back, twitching, Tweeting, and bleeping like an epileptic robot desperate for respite. The train will be waiting to pull my plug and set me free.