Your powers of persuasion are kicking some serious butt right now, and you could sell ice to an Eskimo if you had to! But the only thing you should be selling right now is yourself! This is an excellent time for you to promote yourself at work or in a social context — you are a valuable commodity, and everyone needs to know it. Ask for that raise you’ve been angling for. Ask that cutie to spend some time with you. The responses you get will make you smile.~Yahoo Horoscope for Cancer on January 29, 2008

It’s not necessarily what the horoscope says that I find interesting, but the fact that horoscopes, in general, tend to offer advice about what you should do. That because the moon is in a particular alignment with Saturn, I should sell ice to Eskimos. (Yes, yes, of course that’s not what it’s saying.)

It creates this division in the pathos and the logos. For instance, the economy is in a down-turn, shall we say… a recession, which would indicate to me that asking for a raise would be naive, but, hey, my horoscope says I should do it and the humanity in me wants to cling to that hope of an invisible force guiding me to a good decision.

Plus, how many people fall within my sign? Could you imagine if all the Cancers in the world suddenly went to work and asked for a raise? It’d be a coup! Hmm, now these horoscopes could be interpreted as some grand conspiracy theory about trying to ruin the economy or such. We’ll be calling out astrologists like communists at the McCarthy hearings. Oops, there goes my flight of fancy.

Back to the point. It’s like these two sides are competing. My logical self wants to disregard the information as mere frivolous fun and, yet, it’s still on my homepage. I don’t consciously believe that I have some sort of super power of persuasion right now (or ever really), but it’s probably worked its way deep enough into my subconscious that I’ve decided to talk about it here. Perhaps disregarding horoscopes as absurd is just a defense mechanism; I’m really a true believer, ready with planets and charts to search for my destiny. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? That even though I don’t want it to have an effect on me, it still does. On some level, I am persuaded that today was a good day or will be a good day, simply because there was some indication that it would be a good day. That, because I was told I’d be persuasive, I then must fulfill it and become persuasive.

Oh, but if my boss is reading this, I’ll take any kind of raise you give me.