On the cusp

An investigation of calendric determinism

I was supposed to be born, well, today. March 2nd is six weeks to the day after January 19th, and if I’d been six weeks premature in the Kennedy era, I likely wouldn’t be here to write this.

According to some branches of neuroscience, “possibility” is a false concept — there is only ever the present moment. The human brain is wired to make sense of the noise, not the signal — I was born on January 19th, 1988, not the 20th or March 2nd or in 1888 or 2088, but it is actually easy to imagine otherwise.

Conceived at a graduation party in Laramie, it would be a stretch to call my entrance into this world under a lucky star. “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” was at the top of the charts, and Black Monday crashed the stock market while I was in utero.

It turns out that market downturns would be a theme in my life — I was part of the unlucky high school class of 2005, and I spent my fourth year of college breaking down just as much as the economic prospects around me.

But all of this pertains more to the year of my birth than the month and day. If I’d been less hasty to arrive into this world, I still would have faced the same conditions — and fared far worse had I not been born to two white college students of moderate privilege, knowing from birth the halls of a selective university awaited me.

So, my first conclusion: the year you’re born has far more predictive value on your life course than the month.

The sea-goat: the Barnum Effect and what makes some traits more desirable than others

I’m born on the last possible day to be a Capricorn, and my brother was born on the first. That means, in the language of modern Western astrology, we’re both on the cusp, a liminal space which means you have double the fortune cookies to draw from.

Capricorn predictions seem to draw primarily on a stereotype of being hardworking, business-minded, and square and boring (although not as boring as, say, Virgos.)

I suppose “prediction” is too heavy-handed a word — it’s more like identifying if you’re a Samantha or a Carrie, an INTJ or ESFP, a sheep or a goat. It takes something you don’t control to bring order to all the many phenomena you don’t.

I am fairly pragmatic and ambitious — I was a straight-A high school student, I got a full ride to college, and the local university admitted me to a good MBA program.

But I feel like this on-paper description misses an essential weirdness to my personality. Jesus (traditionally, but I guess we could argue the point) was a Capricorn, and he boycotted eating for 4 days to found a cult movement when he was my age, 33. Joseph Smith was born just one day after my brother, and has an entire biographical song in a Tony-winning musical. Alexander Hamilton is a secular equivalent of the Capricorn trope.

Basically, these men all were Leadership Material, tilting towards the grandiose. None of them were “boring.” If Jesus’ birthdate is in fact not on Saturnalia (cough retconning early Christians cough) would he still be the Messiah?

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius

A statistically improbable though not impossible number of my close female friends are Aquarians.

In ways that are too arcane for me to go into here, and vary by orders of magnitude, anyway, we are entering the age of Aquarius roughly between 1447 and several thousand years in the future.

We stereotype Aquarians as free spirits — hippie chicks marching to their own bongos. Water undeniably has a more fluid nature than earth — go with the flow, man — so the word association seems to have stuck.

Would the fact that I’m born next to the Aquarian part of the calendar help to explain my unconventional goat-itude? I’m not that successful by old-fashioned conventional measures — I don’t own property, I bounce between jobs, I’m unmarried and childless — I mean, maybe that can work for Jesus Christ but I have yet to start anything with a cult like success…

Harmless hobby or pseudoscience … or both?

I used to view horoscopes and astrology with outright scorn.

Just like a Capricorn, amirite?

I jest, but only partially. I think among the young people who take astrology either literally or at least semi-seriously, Capricorns would definitely embody linear, scientific, skeptical thinking. I don’t think of that as a bad thing, if I’m being honest. I’m a math and science tutor, so I have to be comfortable in the realm of logic.

I read a listicle about 12 fun things to do in San Francisco based on your sun sign, and it just omitted Capricorns, which, perfect.

We would have been the leader of a hippie cult in Haight-Ashbury or stayed at home in our regular lives, nothing in between.

The true believers in astrology are often members of marginalized groups — not unlike young people fifty years ago seeking meaning in communal living and rock & roll.

My slide into astro-curiosity

A year or two ago, I started getting more curious about sun signs. I remember browsing an eccentric import store with crystals and stitched-together handbags and lots of nag champa and seeing a yellow volume purporting to explain the upcoming year, 2020.

I was in the store because it was close to my therapist’s home office. Every week, I’d discuss my many neuroses — what I found shameful.

The author must have drawn me in with her verve, but I bought an ebook version of the forecast, and failed to reject other hypotheses by comparing it to all sun signs.

Did consulting my fortune-teller work?

2020 defied all predictions. I found comfort in Llewellyn’s “Challenging” and “Rewarding” days — when really, all days were challenging last year.

By the fall, I had fallen down the rabbit hole one of my Aquarian friends suggested — a woman my age who quit her job in journalism to do astrology readings full time. This version of me was pretty much unrecognizable to me in 2005.

I don’t think booking time with her harmed me. But I recognize certain parallels with my thought patterns at this liminal space as with other breakdowns in society, both in my lived experience and long before my time.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings

The ancient Romans took astrologers both literally and seriously. We’re two weeks away from the Ides of March — a fate which Caesar can’t escape no matter what actions he takes.

But that’s from the perspective of Shakespeare, dramatist. Writers are overly deterministic. We think that because something DID happen, it always WOULD have happened.

Remember those neuroscientists? If something happens, it’s fixed. Time is a unidirectional arrow. Astrology is comforting in two ways: that things can be otherwise in a vague sense, and that the fault is in our stars.

Life is what you make it

My adventures into the realm of sun signs connected me with others, especially other women, but I think it’s psychically vital to realize what we have control over, what we don’t, and focus our energy on the former.

Hamilton, Smith, and Jesus himself are united by the strength of their convictions as much as headlining Broadway shows.

Dolly Parton and Patricia Highsmith are two women who share my birthday. They have nearly opposite personalities, one warm and generous, one cold and calculating.

Rather than delve into the specifics of their charts, I think it’s more productive to identify the life path you want and take whatever action you can to execute.

But a practical Cap WOULD say that wouldn’t she?