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“God, you're not going to ask me what my zodiac sign is, are you?” he asked.
Actually, I was going to ask his Myers-Briggs type, which is a common mode of personality typing and what I consider a very useful tool in relating to individuals, but his reaction to the possibility of being asked what his sign was struck me.
This reaction is not uncommon—those with a scientific-bent consider astrology a pseudoscience; those with a stronger familiarity with psychology think it's more powerful in its ability to suggest personality traits to individuals than help them understand themselves; and those who are firm in their notion that they indeed are a unique snowflake simply can't stomach the idea that they could so easily be pigeon-holed.
I understand the last objection—astrology for some time has been watered down and generalized to better suit a larger audience at the cost of its fascinating brand of insight. The back pages of newspapers and magazines feature predictive blurbs supposedly based on planetary influences, which are, more often than not, made up in-house by unamused interns.
But I've had my chart analyzed and I have to say that I'd get on a great deal better with anyone who took the time to read it. Even the less specific offerings (such as Linda Goodman's or even Joanna Martine Woolfolk's works) provide enough general information to grant any man seeking to charm me a higher chance of success—or at least not enrage me to the point of nuclear explosion.
(That I mention such extremes—charming me versus enraging me—isn't an accident. I'm a Scorpio. I have never set foot on middle ground.)
“To classify me is to ignore me,” a man once told me when I related something to his sun sign in passing. He seemed so hurt by it, I never brought it up again and put my astrological musings on a shelf. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. One, I am deeply fascinated by systems of categorization, in particular this one, and two, even a brief perusal of Goodman's Sun Signs would have prepared me for the mind-warp that lay ahead.
No offense to Gemini men out there—they are generally quite intelligent, talented and entertaining—I'm just not down for wandering around in circles. Give me clear and concise or give me death.
(Or, should I say: give me clear and concise or experience an outburst to put the atomic bomb to shame, quickly followed by a chill the likes of which hasn't been seen since the last ice age. Scorpio, for the win—God, no wonder I'm single.)
Having totally outed myself as an astrology freak, it should come as absolutely no surprise that I'm tickled by MoonIt, a new web site that transcends the concepts of the social network and astrology resource with the goal of providing compatibility assessments based on birth information and user feedback.
The founders Dana Kanze and Mason Sexton, with whom I spoke over the weekend following their awaited debut at TechCrunch50, have more than a passing interest in astrology. Their story goes something like this: in the 1980s, Sexton's father used his knowledge of the positioning of the celestial bodies to his advantage in the stock market, making a believer of the young Sexton, who would often come to him with the birth information of women he was dating for relationship assessments.
“If there was a girl I was interested in, at some point I would ask him, 'hey, here's her birth information, what can you tell me about her?'” Sexton told me over the phone. “This stuff is not a perfect science, of course, and he has made calls that have been a little off, but he's been more right than he's been wrong. Even if it wasn't at first, six months would go by and I'd come back and say, 'you know what? You were right. That became an issue.'”
Sexton and Kanze had gone to school together and been friends, but nothing more. Then, four and a half years ago, they reconnected and Sexton had his father run their chart.
“He told us we had a great dating aspect,” Sexton said.
He and Kanze have been an item since, living together for the past three and a half years, and working together for the past two.
“Beyond dating, he said we had a great business potential,” Sexton added. “That's important, and you can see it's one of the things that we've tried to work into the calculator. The love and relationship part is one of the more compelling parts of our
