I’m a scorpio, and scorpios are good at fortune-telling

“This Thursday will be romantic because the moon is in your zone of relationships. Mercury is in retrograde, so prepare yourself for any surprises at work or at home.”

Such are the cryptic comments in my monthly, weekly and daily horoscopes. Vague inferences about my love life and sometimes even food preferences clutter the mysterious predictions, often leaving me more uncertain about the future than before.

I know, I know — horoscopes are meant to be vague and mysterious; the generalized predictions are tailormade to appeal to everyone and everything. In fact, I don’t consider myself to be superstitious — I usually  don’t believe in anything that remotely has to do with fortune-telling.

Many of my closest friends have explained this psychological phenomenon to me multiple times in attempts to stop my nagging about how Venus and the moon will bring them happiness and harmony.

Despite all those sensical explanations, I still choose to read these “phony” horoscopes.

There really is no concrete reason why I do — it’s just entertaining, and at times comforting.

Fitting daily occurrences into my horoscope prediction is much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It is often therapeutic, and at times exciting. It’s the feeling of knowing there’s a special puzzle piece that is meant to fit perfectly into that empty spot — the act of looking for it is the fun part.

For example, one specific day, I wouldn’t be surprised if I did well on an assignment or test — obviously my horoscope had predicted that a “reward will come from an unsuspected place” that day, and the future was merely unfolding in front of my wizened eyes.

On some days, I need to squeeze and cram a puzzle piece into the empty spot, stretching events to fit my daily horoscope predictions. On those days, my thought process often goes like this:

Oh, I was supposed to experience a complete change in one of my relationships with a close friend today? Uh well, Hannah didn’t point out I had a piece of lettuce on my cheek the entire day, and let me walk around grinning like a fool. That’s it! My horoscope probably means that I should ditch her and never talk to her again. Done.

In the end, however, I never seem to remember the next day how drastically my life was supposed to change according to my horoscope.

As often as I like predicting my entire day from a few lines of text on a suspicious website, sometimes I take a break with my fortune-telling. As “accurate” as I have been in the past, I don’t want to come off as a horoscope fanatic.

But today, all I’m saying is that Neptune is in my zone of productivity, and I have English homework to finish. Professor Trelawney, over and out.