...and don't panic! The Know brings you advice during housing
A true friend is always there for you, especially when you're drunk.
Miss Quit regresses to her childhood this week as the prospect of beginning the "University of Life" looms.
I’m not a particularly superstitious person. Despite being born into a certain faith, I am by no means a believer in anything other than the human values of particular cultures. Having said that, I do dig Buddhism. (Not sure if I buy into the whole be-good-in-this-life-or-return-as-a-tapeworm-in-the-next shtick though).
When it comes to mysticism, however, I do have one guilty pleasure: horoscopes. How inane of me, I know. Still, you just can’t beat a spot of daily procrastination checking out what the stars allegedly have in store. Sometimes, if I’m feeling really extravagant, I’ll pour over the forecast for the entire month ahead. If I don’t like what I’m told, then I simply seek out a different one. Now that’s a kind of faith I can believe in.
And that’s the beauty of them: because it is so easy to disregard the excessively general and usually irrelevant forecast offered by Psychic Steve, or whoever, horoscopes are no weightier than any other form of disposable entertainment.
Silly, fallacious, kitsch? Sure – but whatever, it makes me happy.
Just like anything else categorizable under the heading of Lifestyle these days, Astrology is a mahusive business. Easily the best part of any paper publication, not least for the funny little picture of the bizarrely-haired ‘expert astrologer’, the horoscope page is usually the first thing I flick to. Little wonder then that it’s a mainstay feature of the highest form of ‘trash culture’: Magazines. There is a reason why I have never attempted to give up these glossy smorgasboards of triviality and aspiration.
As such, journalistic duty compels me to report that this week’s quit was thus (predictably) not destined to succeed.
It would have been fine had it not have been for Tuesday’s proffering of a brand new Grazia. The scary thing is I didn’t even have a chance to realise what I was doing until it was too late. Such is the power of habit.
The downfall of many an intelligent woman and, as it goes, man (I’m fairly convinced that one particular ex-boyfriend of mine was attracted as much to my subscription to above-mentioned mag, not least the horoscope page, as he was to me), I’m tempted to go as far as describing the magazine horoscope in religious terms, at least in its affinity within the kinds of ideologies that guide human actions.
Think about it. Both are built on rituals, on sustained belief, on the promise of instantaneous fulfilment and supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to worldly existence. Both are nicely, even conveniently, vague, yet oddly relatable. Both spark intense cynicism and devout zeal in equal measure.
Peculiarly, the ‘father’ of the appropriately named ‘Abrahamic’ religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, was an astrologer himself. Good old Abe. Intrigued by this parallel, I tried to avoid any more violations of my quit, and thus sating my appetite, or horoscopetite if you will, by Googling the contemporary star signs of some key religious figures.
Here, for your consideration and to do with what you will, in no particular order, are my curious findings:
Sadly it hurt my brain too much to try and work out Abraham’s own horoscope (it’s a subject of intense yet endlessly hypothetical debate), so I decided that he would be a Leo, 'cause you’ve got to have a pretty big ego to handle the responsibility of fathering not just one but three big-time denominations. The current Chief Rabbi and spiritual head of the United Synagogue of the UK, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is a Pisces.
Jesus, according to his official birthday, was a Capricorn, although many sources claim him to be a Pisces on an ontological basis, whilst His representative on earth, The Pope, is neither. He’s an Aries.
Muhammad the Prophet and founder of Islam, with a possible birth date of April 20th, would be a Taurus, and the late Zaki Badawi, Chief Imam and UK chairman of the Imams and Mosques Council, a Capricorn.
I’m not sure what type of revelation, if any, this column has provided this week, other than the fact that I have a serious problem with procrastination and oblique abuse of online and printed media for my own entertainment. But then, that was easier to foresee than the charlatanism of Mystic Meg and her not-so-magic ball. Or should that be bull?
Seeing as I’m writing this in retrospect, and because effectively my quits always end as of midnight on Thursdays, I think it allowed to sneak a peek at what kind of weekend Glamour.com predicts for me… hmmm, quickly paraphrased, one of existential crisis resulting from failure. Naturally.
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