Tuesday, August 3, 2010

I Don't Believe in Signs

So, I was doing my daily FaceBook reading. I'd noticed that a friend had stated that she was a "fire" sign (was in relation to a costume she was going to be wearing to an upcoming party).

Now, I'm not that big a believer in things like astrology. It always seemed sub-rational that you'd expect to be able to predict people's actions, future, and predispositions simply based on their date and/or time of birth. That said, growing up in the 70s, you couldn't get by without someone telling you what your "sign" was.

For the record, my traditional zodiac sign is "Aquarius" (and an early Aquarius, at that, having been born just four days into the Aquarian date range). Of course, if you get really picayune, I'd have to note that I'm a Tropical Aquarius or a Sidereal Capricorn - "Tropical" is just the more common western zodiac orientation/reference. (*Ugh*)

Knowing your traditional zodiac sign, apparently, wasn't good enough for some people. They had to be multi-cultural with their (to me) "nonsense". So, again, more sign info was foisted on me. While I'd initially been led to believe that I was a dog under the Chinese system, this is apparently not the case. Ever striving for accuracy and information on things, I looked it up: if people are going to pigeonhole me, then I want to see what level of basis they have to do so. At any rate, what I'd taken, for years, at face value, turned out to be inaccurate. Apparantly, I'm actually a "rooster" under the Chinese sign system. Even though you'd assume that people that bother to label you or themselves would bother to know more about what they're doing, apparently that's too much to ask. The people that had previously told me I was a "dog" had failed to account for the offset-overlap of the Chinese and Julian calendars. In other words, even though the bulk of the Julian/Chinese overlap for 1970 would be "year of the dog", my birth date isn't in that overlap. Instead, I'm the Chinese equivalent of 1969. As such, I'm a "rooster". So, all of you who were so sure that I matched dogish tendencies can stuff it. And, just for a further level of precision, I am an earth-rooster rather than a metal-dog (though, "metal dog" mighta been kinda cool).

Any way, the Chinese stuff is particularly irrelevant, given that (assumption, here) the prior friend's "fire" sign assertion was based on traditional western zodiac association. A quick web search indicates that, I'm, somehow, an "air" sign. Seems kinda counter-intuitive for "the water-bearer" to be an air sign, but, none of this shit ever made much sense to me (insert "shrug" here). Looking at one source, I should be a talkative, social person. Well... Except for in writing, that just really isn't me. It wasn't really my father, either (as a Libra, he was also, apparently, an air sign). Granted, the same site said:
Objective and rational no emotionalism here. The air signs are so objective they can become impractical in their actions and beliefs. Superficial, these signs never want to get into heavy emotional discussions about the dreaded "feelings" dialog that are more important to watery signs. Like the air, these signs hate to be restricted. Freedom of thought and movement are their most cherished desires.
And, I grant that much of that could be applied to me. However, it seems that unless there's a near 100% overlap, you can't really ascribe my predilections as being based upon my date of birth as much as it is my genetic makeup and upbringing.  Besides, were I to go the zodiacs route, I'd tend to have greater agreement with the descriptions I've found for earth-rooster than for either Aquarius or Air. :p

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