I am currently horoscope-less. Pause… No, this is not one of those thunder and lightning inducing moments.
For years, I have thought myself a Capricorn. I’d got comfortable with the idea of being one –they’re terribly witty (when they aren’t being terrible bores with their terribly conservative ways), extremely fun loving (when they aren’t wallowing in existential angst), and just the right amount of lucky (er…except when they are giving contracts viva, but that’s a tale better left alone).
All right so I know that zodiac is largely sham (surprise surprise) but it was nice, you know, when at the end of an extremely shitty day when you’re scanning the day’s paper and your eyes run over the day’s horoscope and there would be something quite vague but very interpretable such as ‘today you may be in for a disappointment but remember the winds of change though windy are ‘ um …er you get the drift, right?
If the weekly horoscope said that ‘the week was going to be super duper awesome,’ I would smile and shrug and say aha! and get on with life. If it said that the week was going to be awful, simply awful, then I’d smile and shrug and say ‘who believes in horoscopes anyways’ and continue to get on with life. But the point was, it was nice, having the horoscope there. And you have to admit; sometimes it rang more true than the day’s weather report.
Then a few days back, a chance remark about my birth date and a little jobless scouting online and I find that I am now stuck…Stuck being a Sagi-Capri cusp (cusp…I hate that word! It sounds like a word that started out just fine and was then abandoned in the middle. Pointing out the appropriateness of this, given its meaning, will not make it seem more charming.)
They don’t make horoscopes for cusps (gah! There’s the word again) and it is no use saying that you could read both the horoscopes because they seem to effectively cancel each other out. ‘The work will be good this week’ of the Capri is easily refuted by the Sag’s ‘are you kidding me! You suck at work, this week,’ note. No sooner do I get ‘a new friend’ thanks to my Sagi weekly horoscope, my Capri connection gleefully tells me ‘beware of any new friend. They’re all, foaming around the mouth, psychopaths.”
Worse, I am left with nothing to blame…not even my stars. No more can I put down the obviously lacking finesse way with which I deal with people with the generalised personality trait of a Capricorn’s unfeeling-ness. Nope – no preset personality type to fall back on. It’s all me…just me. Of course, it isn’t that one is not aware of this but one likes all the excuses that one can find and self induced comforting illusions are difficult…difficult to let go off.
As always I turn to Oscar Wilde (someone whose repository of one-liners would put any modern sitcom to shame) and use his eerie yet strangely comforting words to record yet another triviality of my life and give it a nice little bow-tied finish feel.
The secret of life is being able to appreciate being terribly terribly deceived.
even if it is self induced, eh?
