I’m Surrounded By People Who Are Into Astrology

======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ==== ======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ====

I sit in the living room of a few of my old friends, intently listening and struggling to understand the ins and outs of a birth chart. Having lived in Austin for a couple of years now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this rant, and it definitely won’t be the last. Astrology is everywhere. Maybe I wasn’t as big into the twitter game when I was younger, or maybe my friends weren’t as weird back then, but I feel like it’s made a resurgence in popularity as of late.

Next to me is the leader of my friend group’s astrology movement. She is attempting to convince everybody that this is worth their time by personalizing the conversation to each individual, going from who she deems the most understanding to the least.

Unsurprisingly, she begins with our resident horoscope lover, who is eager to hear all about why she is the way that she is. It becomes more and more evident to me that big astrology makes its money by selling people the vaguest positive descriptions of all time and understanding that consumers will use that information to decode not only themselves, but also their friends. For hours.

I watch my friend, one of the only people I know who almost never takes things seriously, analyze and break down, with an intensity I’ve never seen from her before, what it means for this girl to be a female Pisces. She continues for about ten minutes, until I sneeze a couple of times. My allergies are wildin’ out, and I’m told that it’s probably because Mercury is about to be in retrograde and my body is preparing for the harsher times ahead. Seriously.

She then moves onto my chart because, somehow, I am in the team photo for being most likely to believe that the stars’ location in the sky dictates who I am and who I’ll become. This so-called “astrology bible” that they’re reading from says that my soul “aligns perfectly” with the color red – my favorite color –, and “yearns for” the city of Chicago – the area I’m from. This is more than enough for the more idealistic half of the room to freak out and sing astrology’s praises even higher.

Next up is our (actual) science expert, with whom astrology’s L. Ron Hubbard has been best friends since childhood. There’s a lot of love there, but apparently not much patience because she gets up and leaves as soon as it was declared that her being a Capricorn makes her super practical and logical. Qualities, of course, that only those born between December 21st and January 20th would possess. And you know, that makes a lot of sense to me, since Stephen Hawking, Sir Isaac Newton and MattyB were all born during this time.

Across the room sits our ultimate cynic, shaking her head. She hails from a small farm town and labels astrology as “city folk pseudoscience.” Nobody is readier to hear the dissection of her birth chart than she. As the information pours out, I can see it in her eyes that she’s searching for any possible reason to thwart astrology with the hopes of convincing our truther that there’s nothing legitimate about this whatsoever. She’s almost angry, and our expert is…just the opposite. Absolutely loving every second of this debate.

This entire time, I’ve been trying to decipher whether or not this is a bit. At this point, most of the fun of the astrology debate is figuring that out. Neither woman is here to lose, even if our expert takes this a little less seriously. She studies psychology and knows more about human behavior than I ever will, and I don’t buy any of this.

That being said, conversations like these are not ones that I’d like to miss out on. Our cynic taps out as soon as my interest level spikes: when the subject shifts slightly to auras, and how aura photography – pictures of your aura represented in different colors which reflect your emotional state at the time – is the key to understanding your feelings on a deeper level.

She tells us that she’s been doing a lot of research on local aura photographers, and how she plans to get a series of photos of her aura taken in the next few months. We’re more than welcome to join in order to study what our aura radiates and what those specific colors mean.

Never have I agreed to plans so quickly..

Image via Shutterstock

17

Respond

Email this to a friend

Hey, I saw this on Post Grad Problems. Check it out.

Intern Caroline