I’ve always been curious about astrology. Every year my uncle/godfather prepares my astrological chart and spends an hour going over what Pluto is doing in the 7th house and how Mercury is rising, etc. etc. Given that I don’t know what any of this means, these explanations usually shoot right by me.

A few years ago I began to notice that many of my detail oriented friends happened to be Virgos, and many Virgos I met happened to be neat freaks, so I began to take notice.

Maybe there’s something to astrology after all. In the spirit of exploration, I decided to try out sample reading from Astrology.com and fork over a few bucks for a reading or two. A $12 “Career Path” report yielded the following excerpt:

You were born under the sign of AQUARIUS and your ruling planet is Uranus, which makes you rebellious, independent and unconventional.

Your Sun sign is FIXED and this impels you to fulfill an organizing function, either in thought or action. Your attitude is firm, persistent, stable and decisive. You have the ability to concentrate profoundly on your projects and to stay firm in your purposes. In spite of this, you will have to cultivate a certain flexibility to avoid obstinacy and selfishness.

Aquarius is an AIR sign and this makes you curious, sociable and mentally very active. All occupations that stimulate your intellect and the possibility of communicating will be very favorable. You need variety, harmony and the exchange of ideas.

You like to be free and do not adhere to routine or the limitations of daily life. Because of this, your manner is personal, informal and sometimes a bit too accelerated. You are very curious and attracted to everything that is special, different or mysterious. You enjoy travel, adventure and the possibility of meeting new people and places. You can communicate easily and make friends everywhere you go. Your independent attitude permits you to relate to everybody and not to commit yourself to anybody. You learn everything that interests you very quickly, but also get bored quickly when a subject is slow or tedious.

Your life will be filled with changes and surprises, some will be planned and others totally unexpected. You are very creative and always put your personal touch on everything you do. You have the ability to invent, transform and change your environment. Your demeanor and the course of your life will always be unpredictable.

You were born to change the world around you, to provide new ideas, styles and conventions. Your way of thinking or acting probably will be criticized, but it will teach others to widen their horizon and mentality. You were born to break the rules, procedures and duties, especially when they become outmoded or obsolete. Your humanitarian, altruistic and futuristic vision will permit you to think about the function of groups and to render your help to them. Another of your missions is to create, to invent, to innovate and to develop your creativity and imagination.

To evolve, your spirit needs to learn to develop patience with the things you cannot change or with people who are unable to keep up with your pace. You have to control your eccentricity, rebelliousness and wrong ideas so that you don’t waste your energy protesting things that you do not accept. You could easily fall into immature and erratic attitudes, or quickly change your feelings and interests, and act with indifference and coldness toward others.

The report was 10 pages long and well worth the $12. I would say about 95% of it was dead-on accurate. Much of this I’d heard before, but not all together or so well laid out. Their $20 birthday report was also on target. So maybe there’s something to this after all?

Astrology.com also has free mini readings that can be fun to check out. Here was my mini reading:

Section 1: How You Approach Life and How You Appear To Others
You are always questioning and learning, and you seem young and alive no matter what your chronological age, for your mind is always alert, curious, flexible and open to new experiences. You have a childlike enthusiasm for anything new and you learn easily, but you also get bored rather quickly. You can be something of a scatterbrain, for you tend to have so many ideas and irons in the fire that it is hard to keep track of them all. You need and crave variety, change, mental stimulation, and an active social life.

Section 2: The Inner You: Your Real Motivation
You are a freedom-loving, strong-willed, and independent-minded individual, and you insist upon living your own life as you see fit, even if that means ignoring convention and tradition. In personal relationships you cannot be owned or possessed, and while you are willing to share yourself with another, you do not always adjust easily to the emotional give and take of a close relationship. Though intellectually open, you can be enormously stubborn, opinionated, and inflexible on a one-to-one level. You have strong convictions and feelings about fairness and equality, and you try to live by your ideals, but your ideals about how people SHOULD treat one another don’t always take into account human weaknesses, differences, and needs. You probably dislike sentimentality and traditional gender roles and “games”.

Silly, but fun.