I do not, and never have, believed in astrology, sun signs, or anything of the sort. Of course not. I’m a rational person. I’ve been known to mock people who do believe in this sort of thing — who make their names ridiculous with added letters for numerological significance, consult the family astrologer for business advice or read the horoscope section of a newspaper supplement and actually expect to have just the sort of day it describes.
And yet, and yet, and yet. I read that Linda Goodman book when it was circulating my classroom, just as all my classmates did. I knew a twinge of disappointment when a boy I had a crush on in school was discovered to be a Capricorn, and therefore incompatible with my own Libra self. And so on, and so forth. And a couple of weeks ago, even as I joked about people undergoing identity crises over the addition of a new sign to the zodiac, I was rather annoyed for a moment at the thought that I might be summarily bumped out of class Libra (balanced, pleasant, attractive, and likely to have dimples) to class Virgo (sensible, predictable, and honestly rather boring-sounding). Luckily, it seems that the new system only applies to more recent births.
My sternly-repressed superstitiousness aside, it is things like this that make me feel very, very old. In my (comically short, according to many of my friends and colleagues) lifetime, we’ve developed the Internet; technology has changed in massive, massive ways, and our lives have become unrecognisably different; this doesn’t particularly scare me, and I accept it as natural. But also in my lifetime we’ve lost one planet and gained an Ophiuchus. And while these changes may
intrude less on our daily lives and may seem less earthshattering than, say, email, they’re bigger than they look. Do Mickey Mouse and his friends really make sense, now that we know that Pluto is named after a random, insignificant rock in the Kuiper Belt? Do we have to rid ourselves of the notion that 13 is an unlucky number lest the existence of 13 zodiac signs dooms us all? And think of the poor teachers and textbook writers who must now make up new acronyms with which to help students learn the names of the planets. What about the sellers of sun sign mugs and keychains, who suddenly find all their stock out of date?
And underneath all this is the knowledge that the world our (hypothetical) children grow up in will be fundamentally different from our own in ways that we have not anticipated. In most ways that’s not a bad thing. I like to think that I was admirably pragmatic when poor little Pluto was demoted.
I do have one complaint though. I remember learning, in the middle of my class’ zodiac signs phase, that Scorpios were hot. The book made them sound brooding and intense and sexy in a way that is intensely attractive to teenage girls (exhibit A: vampire romances). Thanks to the post-Ophiuchus reshuffle, the number of days in a year during which Scorpios can be born has been drastically reduced. If there’s any validity to any of this zodiac stuff, generations to come are set to face a shortage of sexy, broody types. And that’s a terrible thing.
— The writer is an editor and freelance writer. She blogs at http://bluelullaby.blogspot.com. bluelullaby@gmail.com
