Stars

I have been publishing, unpublishing and republishing this post for a few nights now, which tells you one thing: I am obsessive. My birth chart, however, tells me another thing: There is a name for my obsessing and it is “Mars in Virgo”.

Astrology, if you ask me, is actually emotional physics. It is the study of celestial movements and positions and the effect that they have on emotional energy. It is not so much the horoscope that forecasts what will happen to you as the birth chart that maps where the sun, moon, planets and stars were when you were born – and shows how you happen to be who you are. You are too complex to be just one of the 12 sun signs in the simplified horoscope. You are also your moon sign (what you are like in your emotional life), your Venus sign (what you are like in love), your Mars sign (what you are like in lust, in action, in anger – when you are being a total animal), and so on. If you want one thing when you need another, if you say one thing when you mean another, if you love a man but can’t live with him, the push and pull may show in your birth chart.

The last time I was into birth charts, I was inspired by a Jeanette Winterson article on astrological truth. This time I am into them with S, my story-geek friend, so we can speak in astrological shorthand in discussions of stories and people (“Daoming Si, passionate, possessive, crazy jealous – Venus in Scorpio”). Along the way though I have found out quite a few things about myself, family, friends and Jay Chou – well, mostly about myself.

If I have ever been proud of how painstaking I can be about work, I am not now. Is a crab proud it can move sideways? Is a bird proud it can fly? Now I know I am a Mars in Virgo girl, I can’t be proud. When other people turn into total animals they are rams, bulls or Hulks. When I am a total animal I turn into a cranky old maid, fussing over spelling or rewriting an article yet again. I don’t do it because I am good at work. I do it because I do it. Now I know.

To get your birth chart drawn up, click here.
To read Jeanette Winterson on how she got her birth chart drawn up, click here.

Goodbye

Sometimes life snatches the goodbyes –

I found out a friend died and sometime between reading the shock message and getting the shock all I could do was try to remember: When was the last time we talked? When was the last time we said goodbye?

My Japanese friend M was a writer, a fan girl, a believer in writing of the things she was a fan of with an interested, objective understanding. She was 20 years older than me yet younger, bolder. She was interested in things: people, travel, movies, Korean Wave, Bollywood, men… She would say, “That is SO interesting,” and mean it. She had friends who travel not so much to countries as to hotels, who explore not so much the world as deluxe Shangri-La bubbles in distant realms. She would say, “Don’t be like them.” She was never like them. She stayed curious about things, from Tony Leung’s wedding to the effect of cross-strait flights on Chinese-Taiwanese extramarital love to HDB heartland malls.

She was going to come to Singapore next month. Her last e-mails to me were about the trip. My last e-mails to her were about Jane Juska, the divorced schoolteacher who wanted a sex life at age 66, got it and wrote of it in A Round-Heeled Woman. I said I would send her a copy of Ms Juska’s new Vogue column on being a mistress at age 75. I haven’t had a chance to and won’t now –