What's the fun of fulfilling expectations, anyway? Since everyone else is using the date of 1 January to look forward, I thought I'd do the very definition of a 180 and look back in the opposite direction, knowing I'll end up revealing just as much about myself but in my usual thoroughly underhanded manner.So let's look backwards, to the day of my birth.

I know that several of my friends find astrology fascinating or deeply meaningful. I greet it with a healthy dose of skepticism—was the ephemera of my personality cemented into an ever-fixéd mark from the moment the obstetrician set my mother's C-section date? I don't know. It's the eternal question of destiny and free will. What is 'me'? Are personalities fluid or rigid constructs? Can we, fundamentally, change? Or do we spend our entire lives becoming what we were meant to be all along?

Courtesy of Heather and fridayfive.org:

While talking with a cable company phone rep this afternoon, I read a post on a weblog that pointed to astrology.com, and for the sheer amusement value I decided to pull up whatever they had to say about me.

(see full version on flickr)

Read on to see what they had to say about me:

You are very strong-willed and proud, but intensely private and not easy to know well. Behind your quiet exterior lies a great deal of emotional depth, sensitivity, complexity, and also fierce determination. When you want something you go after it rather quietly but insistently and wholeheartedly—and you usually get it.