Jupiter and Pluto in the Hiz-ouse!

My 10th house that is - which is all about career, and fame, astrologically speaking.

Now, I’m not a strict adherent of astrology - not by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, what exactly is there to adhere to, anyway? Candle burning and Goddess worship for Winter Solstice? Do you have to make an annual pilgrimage to the Renaissance Festival to stock up on healing energy crystals? Keep Madonna’s “Ray of Light” in heavy rotation with your whale song CD’s?

I’ve always enjoyed astrology, as a kind of ancient, pre-Freudian psychology. I like to imagine the Druids using horoscopes for pre-job screenings; like, if you’re a Pisces, maybe methodically placing the giant rocks at Stonehenge isn’t for you, but we do have an opening in our “staring up at the sky all day, charting the heavenly bodies” department.

I have this completely bogus, pop-psychological theory as to why any system of divination “works”; I think the Tarot cards, or I Ching coins (or whatever) once they’re dealt, they engage the logical, analytical, language-centered left brain, freeing up your intuitive, creative RIGHT brain to play free-association with the world at large, sort of like a giant Rorschach test. So really, the answers aren’t supernatural; rather, they’re coming from deep down inside you. And the reason you can’t access that wealth of self-knowledge without all the pre-modern parlor tricks and slight of hand is that usually, your left brain is way too busy dressing down your right brain, like James Randi getting all up in Sylvia Browne’s grill over in the smoking area, while the poor old bat is just trying to inhale a carton of Camel Straights so she can maintain the demonic growl that Montel Williams finds so positively enchanting.

Ah, I just love relativism, allowing me to get my new-age cake and eat it, too - with my existentialist tendencies perfectly intact.

But, then, what about those real-live supernatural moments, those honest to mergatroid flashes of intuition, like knowing who’s on the phone when it rings, even though you haven’t heard from that person in years? Sure, science can test those experiences back in the lab and confidently slap them with the “COINCIDENCE” stamp – but what if that doesn’t satisfy the person who actually experienced that nigh-transcendent mystery moment?

Just the other morning, I had a dream where I screwed up a big pile of stuff at work. I’d wake up for an second and know that it was just a dream, but when I drifted back to sleep I couldn’t shake that lingering sense of “Oh, crap”. Sure as hell, I came in, and something was messed up – no, nothing big, but still, just kinda weird.

Which brings me back to astrology; everything I’ve ever read about me, as a Pisces, so entirely captures my little personality quirks and gawky fetishes that it’s downright spooky. On a lark, a few months ago, I got a book called “Darkside Astrology”, which centers on the Zodiac’s less admirable traits. After a few passages like “anything with a pulse will get you going, and you sometimes think that maybe you’re being a teensy bit too picky” and “what you want is never what you will want in one minute, or what you did want 3 minutes ago” I swear, I wanted to cry. My editor at The Onion, he’s a Pisces, and I’m convinced that if I never met my wife (a Pisces-Taurus pairing predicted in the books with a level of accuracy usually reserved for blood tests) I would actually BE him; like, if we tried to occupy the same space at the same time, we’d melt together in a fit of CGI fueled protoplasmagoria, like Ron Silver and his future self in Timecop.

This year has been unusual for me, astrologically speaking. Those hip, irreverent horoscopes from Rob Brezny at “Free Will Astrology” have followed the events of my life over the last twelve months like a Daniel Stern narration from The Wonder Year. It’s not so much that they’ve predicted events, but they’ve commented on little milestones in my life, from my car accident, which occurred in no small part to my infinite distractibility (“I'd like to see you permanently lose at least 50 percent of your chronic aggravation.”) to my freelance gig w/ The Onion (“it's definitely a time when you can move closer to making a living from doing what you love.”)

Then, in October, my co-worker Katy (a free spirited creative-type whose natural hair color is a shade of red that every woman I’ve ever loved has spent countless dollars on trying to mimic at one time or another) pointed me in the direction of Astrologyzone.com, and that’s when things got really weird.

For about 12 weeks now, my horoscope has been predicting a big, enormous shift in my professional life; not just vague little subjective tidbits, but actual specifics, like what industry I’d be working in (media) and even dates when the shift would begin to take place. And sure enough, on December 11th (as predicted) I had an interview for a job. And really, not just any job. You know how you’ll talk to a friend, and ask him how work is going, and he’ll say, “OH, its okay. I mean, it’s not my dream job.”? Well, what I interviewed for, truly, hands down, without a doubt, would be MY dream job. And no matter what happens, I’m just happy to know that it’s out there; I was beginning to think that such a thing – where I would spend my days writing about what I love, and actually make a living wage, AND health benefits – only existed in my post lunch hour day dreams.

But that's the thing - as of now, nothing has happened. I’m sitting, and waiting, and wondering, and hoping, and (so far) successfully staving off little pointless bouts of regret and self loathing about what I could have done differently. But I’ve gotten no word.

So it begs the question: was Sartre right? Is the universe inherently empty, with no direction or purpose, regardless of all our hopes and dreams? Or is Daniel Dennet (another avowed humanist) correct; that a living, conscious universe, guided not by mechanistic determinism, but rather on cosmic intervention, no better for humanity’s intentions?

I withhold judgment for now – but no matter what, I’m gonna continue to do what I can to make the things that I want happen. That's probably the best way to go, no matter what side of the philosophical / spiritual fence you sit on.