The sign

Yesterday, after two solid months of sartorial spendthriftiness, I found a really great-fitting pair of pants at Banana Republic. And BR was having yet another store-wide 25 percent off sale, this one under the guise of a Mad Men promotion. (It’s really going to suck when the economy recovers enough that the retail environment reverses its all-sale, all the time approach to extracting dollars from wallets.) So yeah. I bought the pants.

At the register, I noticed that they’re hawking a line of charm bracelets/necklaces/whatnot. The base pieces come on a card that urges you to fill the piece with charms. A meager basket of charms sat nearby. The charms – like six of them total, it was pathetic – were horoscope based. Unsurprisingly, there were no Virgo charms to be had.

I have a couple theories. One, that if you take for granted that the attributes purported to comprise a given sign are in fact accurate, Virgos may just be too pragmatic and skeptical to bother buying astrological junk. This would suggest that fewer Virgo products are produced relative to other, more receptive signs. OR. Two, that flying in the face of logic given their alleged personality traits, Virgos are more susceptible to buying into astrological theory, literally: that Virgo-branded t-shirts and mugs and trinkets appeal on a greater level to Virgos. These Virgos snap up all the crap they can, leaving other, late-coming Virgos to speculate about the absence of Virgo products.

As a Virgo with this allegedly Spockian personality, I have to admit that I’ve always felt a certain attraction to astrology. I’ve got my handy copy of Linda Goodman’s Sunsigns. Once upon a time, I’d consult it when I encountered a person I struggled to understand. But I’ve fallen away. On FB, a fellow Virgo posted something about the daily horoscope and I responded in an accidentally ignorant way, which she gently pointed out, then I responded stupidly again, realized it, and corrected myself. I responded stupidly because I pay less attention to astrology now than I used to. I used to care more, but this aspect of myself has been subsumed by other time-sucking matters.

And this from a woman who checks her horoscope daily. Le sigh.