PAYING ATTENTION TO DETAILS LIKE GOOD VIRGOS

9.2.02

I'm doing something a little bit different this week, in honor of our Virgo friends and Friday's New Moon in their sign. Virgos have a reputation for being anal-retentive neat freaks (not, incidentally, always an accurate reputation). This comes from their efforts to make logical sense of the world by organizing all its details into their proper categories. Of course, these categories don't necessarily derive from anywhere other than a Virgo's own mental meaning-systems. But no matter. Those of us who, by preference or not, live in more meandering or chaotic circumstances appreciate Virgos for cleaning things up a bit for us. And for occasionally offering us those immaculately phrased bits of helpful feedback that, if we didn't know better, might sound like criticism. (We can't get mad at Virgos for this, since we intuit that they turn their critical lenses back on themselves most intensely.)

This New Moon is notable because the Sun and Moon, together in Virgo, are making a sharp square (90-degree angle) to Pluto. Though Virgos can be expert problem-solvers, sometimes they can fixate too much on all the myriad details rather than the bird's-eye view necessary for holistic understanding. With Pluto imposing its uncomfortable penetrating force onto the solar/lunar scene this week, we may discover that seemingly insignificant details of our lives suddenly reveal much more about our deeper troubles. We must engage with the underlying psychologies that perpetuate our disorders, rather than swiftly vacuuming up the dust or filing the papers away in their alphabetical file-folders. It is not enough to bask in how observant we are; we must do something with these observations, or else we are more culpable than if we were merely blind.

The other big news this week is a grand air trine (three planets, all in air signs, making 120-degree angles to one another) involving Venus, Saturn and Uranus. As I've mentioned previously, the Saturn-Uranus trine fosters the usage of dynamic & revolutionary change to build new enduring structures that reform the status quo and move us to the next level. With Venus, at home in Libra, joining forces with Saturn and Uranus, now is a particularly apt time to creatively communicate with others, build community and push the intellectual envelope.

With that in mind, I undertook a little creative experiment to collect details—no whole picture, just details—about Virgos by asking the craigslist online community for their feedback and combining it with my own. Below you will find the fruits of this labor. Maybe all you out there—especially the Virgos—can sift through the details to find secret revelations that apply in your case.

1. Are Virgos really anal? A few responses certainly affirmed this notion. Examples: (i) "YES! Life isn't perfect enough for me?" (ii) "I can be anal-retentive and controlling… especially about housework—making the bed, loading the dishwasher, washing the dishes." There was also talk of following recipes to a tee, balancing checkbooks to the penny, and going to bed "on time." One woman claims, "The only thing I'm anal retentive about is my hair. I don't like most haircuts." But, after all, she's on the Virgo-Libra cusp, so…

2. One gentleman may have taken offense to my question as to whether he thought the "bad rap" about anal-retentive Virgos was true. "I think the whole society is anal-retentive so why pick on Virgos? And, as you know yourself, if you look for confirmation of a behavior you can usually find something odd, disturbing or downright weird." Hey, I never said being anal was odd, disturbing or weird; I was just asking your opinion.

3. I must fess up. I used to have this irrational notion that Virgos were a bit…how should I put this…uptight and prudish, considering their always-neat appearance and their association with the symbol of the Virgin. Then I read, in a few different places, about their secret kinky side, the one they keep beneath that pure and restrained cover. One astrologer even links Virgo to the archetype of the sacred prostitute, who fuses madonna and whore to provide sexual healing in service to humanity.

4. So I posed the question: "What secret kinky (but not necessarily sexual) desires do you yearn to fulfill but keep hidden from the general public?" A couple interesting responses: (i) "the power to make whomever i desire my slave." (ii) "I do soetimes imagine pushing George Bush into a smelly pond and then kissing his wife...she's kinda cute if a little not my type. This may be Freudian, I don't know. I'm just a silly Virgo."

5. One double Virgo (Sun & Moon) finds himself smoking a lot of cigarettes and weed, hoping to be reincarnated into a new body. I kindly reminded him that, for this life anyway, he's already in the only body he's going to get and recommended that he try to come to peace with it.

6. An astrologer replied to me that she found many Virgos (and Pisces) get a bad rap in astrology writing because of a bias inherent in the type of people who write books (usually influenced by Gemini, which squares Virgo). For that reason, she believes that many Virgos feel slandered by astrology. I wouldn't disagree.

7. She also reported the rumor that many restaurant kitchens are infested with Virgos.

8. I posted my craigslist request several times to solicit additional feedback. One guy replied to my first posting with his helpful opinion on how the "anal" thing was all a big impression that wasn't as true as it seemed. Then I was surprised to receive a second reply from him two evenings later, a single line of text that read as follows: "Quit with all your e-address collection ruse posts, so you can attempt to sell in email." I'm still wondering what prompted his change in consciousness. I wrote back: "Thank you for your original email, in which you offered me feedback to the questions I was asking. As for this second email, I'm not sure I understand why you think my posts are a ruse. I'm not interested in selling you anything, just collecting feedback. I'm sorry if I've somehow offended you since your first email, but I find your suspicions to be way off base."

9. On a closing note, I found it slightly frustrating but altogether fitting to receive a short email from the editor, detailing why he felt it necessary to delete my posting (the third time around) from the "general community" section: This posting belongs in our "small biz ads" category. It may seem like this is a better category for your ad, or that you might get a better response if it were posted here, but if we were to allow this then the categories would soon be overwhelmed with misplaced advertisements. Properly classified postings would soon lose the prominence they would otherwise have enjoyed, and the category would cease to be the resource that it was intended to be. Incidentally, Mr./Ms. Editor, as I wrote back in my plea for editorial mercy, soliciting people's opinions does not qualify as advertising. All this talk about "better categories" and "properly classified postings" is making me think that the editor must have some serious Virgo going on in his/her chart. What do you all think?

Disclaimer: All generalizations about, and jokes at the expense of, Virgos are done with humor and love. If you've drawn any categorical conclusions from the above nonsense, I'd love to know, so email me.