戌年
It is now the Year of the Dog in Japan. Japan follows the Chinese zodiac, but it celebrates the New Year on 1 January of the Western calendar. (The whole thing is very disorienting if you’re studying classical poetry, because you have to keep straight the Western calendar, the solstices, and the traditional lunar calendar by which months and seasons were actually named. Happily, I don’t have to contend with that right now, unless I decide to translate a poem at the end of this post.)
The personality typology you hear discussed the most here is by blood type, but the year of your birth gets a lot of play, too. When Atsushi and I began to date, it was considered very auspicious that he was a Monkey and I was a Rat–no wiseacre comments from the peanut gallery, okay?–two signs that are held to be compatible. (Of course, my last boyfriend had been a Dragon, and our supposed celestial compatibility hadn’t seemed to help all that much.) With its preponderance of snakes, dogs, wild boars, and monkeys, the zodiac can start to sound like an extended lawyer joke, but none of the descriptions is negative in the main, of course.
I was born in March, so I’m a Rat according to both Chinese and Japanese measurements. As with all such things, you read your typology, and some of it is so dead-on it’s kind of spooky…
One of the Rat’s biggest fault is that they try to do too much at once. They often scatter their energies and get nothing accomplished.
…and some of it is so off the mark it makes you laugh.
They are very appealing. They have a bright and happy personality, and this keeps them busy socially. They love parties and other large gatherings.
Yeah, right.
In any case, those who are thinking about having a child may want to hurry things up so it’s born by the end of this year. The traits associated with the Year of the Dog aren’t bad at all:
People born in the Year of the Dog possess the best traits of human nature. They have a deep sense of loyalty, are honest, and inspire other people’s confidence because they know how to keep secrets. But Dog People are somewhat selfish, terribly stubborn, and eccentric. They care little for wealth, yet somehow always seem to have money. They can be cold emotionally and sometimes distant at parties. They can find fault with many things and are noted for their sharp tongues. Dog people make good leaders. They are compatible with those born in the Years of the Horse, Tiger, and Rabbit.
Notice how every sign is described as being eccentric, BTW? And I guess most parents wouldn’t be crazy about that “cold emotionally” part, though given the potential for heartache in life, it might come in handy later on.
Contact me
My youngest child is a dog. The sharp tongue thing is oh so true to the point we’ve threatned him with duct tape several times. No event/choice/idea or action in this house will go unnoticed or un-protested. Weirdly, aside from that he’s quite a good kid, mildly responsible (right now he views good grades as optional) and reasonably obedient (after he informs you that what you want him to do is stupid.)
BTW — yesterday at our party there was Veuve Cliquot. We drank it. Quite a lot of it, actually.
And I passed on no warnings. Although it was very tempting to tease the person who usually brings it, particularly as he’s reading a gay-male-protagonist mystery right now. I didn’t think the fact that I was the one who lent book to his wife who passed it on to him meant I couldn’t — or shouldn’t — tease him, but I never got a chance to. Of course I was also the one who introduced our group to Veuve Cliquot. In fact our gay friends had never heard of it. (They’re rural-by-choice gays, so they’re more likely to know beer.) They weren’t at the party and I didn’t have a chance to tell them their gay-membership-card is in serious jeopardy.
Um… none of the preceding makes any sense. I think I’m hungover.
Happy 2006 everyone!
P.
I have no experience with whether mouthy teenagers can turn out to be good citizens as adults [ahem], so I’ll just say good luck with that.
Regarding the champagne thing, I thought of you last night when one of my friends’ women friends showed up at our dinner party. When she’d gotten to the liquor store, all the regular-sized bottles of champagne were gone. So she brought individual little bottles–the size you’d usually associate with wine coolers–of Moet &Chandon. She was so terribly amusingly ashamed of herself for showing up at a gay dinner party without a proper bottle, and I kept trying to tell her that there would be a merry sort of picnic-like air to the whole thing, but she didn’t believe me.