"Flight" of the Geminis

Imagine a workplace retirement luncheon where the guest of honor is being congratulated on thirty years of service with the same employer. Imagine that, during this luncheon, there's a person in the back of the room who is saying under her breath, "Shoot, if you look up thirty years from now and I'm still here, just shoot me."

That person is a Gemini.

I'm a Gemini, and this is my birth month. In celebration of my birth month, I'd like to take this opportunity to clear up a few things about Geminis. We're terribly misunderstood.

Most Geminis, including myself, are accused of being "flighty" -- that we move from job, career, spouse, etc. fleetingly, as if we are incapable of doing anything for a sustained period of time. The term "flighty" is used derisively when applied to us.

That's because people don't understand Geminis. What they don't understand about us is that we have a deep appreciation of life and how fleeting it is. If there were a motto for Geminis, it would be, "Life's too short to ________________(fill in the blank). When our needs or priorities change, we Geminis don't fight the change for the sake of racking up consistency points in a system without rewards; we roll with the change and adjust accordingly. Others see such changes, whether they are changes in jobs, spouses, or even the cities where we live, as evidence of us being "flighty"; we, on the other hand, see such changes as a natural shift in our happiness demand curve. Because life's too short.

And why do our priorities and needs seem to change more often than for other astrological signs? Because the two biggest transgressions you can commit against a Gemini are to bore her or waste her time. As for boredom, Geminis have an insatiable need to be learning many new things, and we don't see any inconsistency in mastering two or more disparate disciplines. If someone with a different astrological sign said they wanted to be a neurosurgeon and a stripper, they'd dismiss the idea as crazy before they could even pursue it. A Gemini, on the other hand, would not only pursue these two disparate paths at the same time, but would explain to sceptics the synergy between the two: "Well, you see, the manual dexterity and strength needed to effortlessly glide down a pole enhances one's ability to do surgery, assuming you don't hurt yourself . . . ."

As to wasting our time, Geminis are quick to assess a situation and determine whether they can achieve what they want by doing what they're doing. If not, at least one of two things happens: We either change what we want or change what we're doing to accomplish what we want. Either way, to the other astrological signs, we appear flighty. But to us, there's no medal in life, no reward whatsoever, for continuing on a path that can't get us where we want to be. We either change the path, change the destination, or both. But to look up after staying on a path for, oh, thirty years or so to find yourself someplace you knew you didn't want to be? That is a living hell for a Gemini. The idea that we've wasted our precious time on this earth chasing something we knew we didn't really want is anathema to a Gemini, whether we've wasted it in a career or in a relationship.

It is my Gemini ability to reassess what I want and recalibrate how I'm going to get it that led me to be able to effectively and effortlessly extricate myself from bad relationships when I was single. When I started dating after breaking up with BMNB, I would stay in a relationship to prove a point or to not hurt the other person's feelings. As I got older and trusted my instincts, i.e., "I know how this movie ends and I don't like it," when it came to relationships, I got better at parachuting out before things got ugly. Even better -- I got to the point where I could size a guy up five minutes after he spoke to me and know whether there was any potential there. The failure to master subject-verb agreement was often a dead giveaway. My male friends said I was harsh. I, on the other hand, thought I was just efficient in using my time on this planet. There's no sense in thinking a guy's going to master subject-verb agreement if he hasn't by age 35 and no sense in thinking that I'm going to be able to overlook that.

So when your Gemini daughter, sister, friend, etc., changes jobs, men, or cities, don't question her choice or call her "flighty." She knows what she wants, even if it's changed, and she's going after it in whatever time she's got left on this earth. Instead, perhaps you should question your own choices and ask yourself whether you're staying the course for consistency's sake or for happiness' sake. For Geminis, it's the latter.