december 9th and april 7th

i found a coat yesterday! and i got my airport card in my computer at work today! it must be astrological. i don't necessarily believe in astrology, but i think it's dumb to dismiss it outright. because who really knows? plus i read this book one time that told all about you based on your birthday, and i looked up everyone i knew, and it was dead on for every single person. i wish i could remember the name of the book. it was like *the birthday book* or something. but i just looked that up on amazon, and i don't think that was it. it was a whole series; there was one for your love life, and one for something else, etc. i really want to get all of them. maybe they don't publish it anymore. anyways, the one i read was the one that had 2 pages of general information and advice for each birthday of the year. it told me that i was lucky and that my main spiritual challenge in life was to try to be sympathetic to other people, presumably people who were not also born on my birthday. i have been trying ever since, but haven't really been super successful. actually, i was already trying to be sympathetic before i read the *birthday book*, or whatever it's really called, because i saw something on tv, probably pbs, about a study that showed that kids whose mothers don't show sympathy, like saying "poor baby!" and stroking their heads, when they get hurt, or something else bad happens, don't develop the ability to feel sympathetic to other people when they grow up. it is a common parenting strategy not to make too big of a deal when a kid gets hurt, like if they bump their head, because it just makes them cry more; it probably freaks them out when you freak out. i think that my parents used this strategy, plus i got left with nannies a lot as a child, and that's why i tend to find it easy not to feel sorry for people. but i always make an effort to *act* like i feel sorry for people, in hopes that it will help me to actually feel sorry for people in the future, and also so that those people in turn might develop a more sympathetic personality as well.