Virgoing to get you

My horoscope, with which I have become fascinated, reads in the Hartford Advocate, for last week:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “The moon asked me to meet her in a field tonight,” wrote mystic poet Hafiz (trans.). “I think she has amorous ideas.” You might soon feel a similar suspicion, Virgo. According to my reading of the astrological omens, seductive offers will be coming your way, and not just from the moon. Secret suitors may emerge from the shadows. Temptations could lure you toward the far ends of your imagination. The sheer profusion of invitations you’ll receive might make you giddily agitated.

I’m not sure how long these horoscopes are supposed to last – until next week? When they get replaced by the next horoscope? – but if this Rob Brezany is serious about his “reading of the astrological omens,” he might want to check his chart again.

First of all, “not just from the moon” implies that one of the “seductive offers” about to be received by anyone born between my birthday and Sept. 22, will actually be from the moon.

Sorry, moon. I’m not available for your sort of interlude. I know you, all shifty and waning, here one week and gone the next, and I’m not up for that sort of disappearing act.

And anyway, according to Hafiz, you’re not my type. I like men.

Secondly, the three sentences making up what is presumably the prediction for my week are strangely unrelated. I like the tentative wording – “may,” “could,” “might” – because it implies some level of humility on Rob’s part, but it frustrates an attempt to read this horoscope as a coherent narrative. Will all three happen, in order? Is there a cause-and-effect relationship, here? If the first one doesn’t happen, will the second or third? Presumably, the “temptations” of the second sentence are related to the “secret suitors” of the first and the “profusion of invitations” of the last, but how, exactly?

And what about setting? The secret suitors are coming from the shadows – which, by the way, sounds pretty ominous and creepy to me; I mean, why not just knock on my door, like normal people? Why be all Batman about it? – while I’m being lured to the far ends of my imagination – away from said suitors, or towards them? And where are they inviting me?

Because I don’t really go to bars or dance clubs or anything. I mean, I would rather spend time watching a movie or walking at the park or sitting in a coffee shop or going on a road-trip. So if they wanted to invite me to “go clubbing,” it wouldn’t impress me much.

I have to say, he was right about being agitated.

Thirdly, the prediction is so incredibly unlikely that thinking about it does, in fact, add an element of giddiness to my agitation – the way the rain of frogs at the end of Magnolia makes one feel a bit giddy. It’s miraculously unlikely.

But the universe does seem to be conspiring on some level. My girl says to me today, as we’re sitting at the library, from out of the blue: “You got a boyfriend yet?”

I say, “Nope. Not yet.”

She says, “Are you gonna get one?”

I laugh. “You mean at the boyfriend store? What do you think – should I go for the cheap model?”

She laughs. “Get the expensive one.”


Now – just in case – at least I’ll have some idea of which one to pick.