What is it with women and horoscopes?

Okay, I didn't mean that to sound like a put-down. Please bear with me for a second. I'll tell you a story.

I met a woman not long ago. We hardly knew each other. We're finding out things like birthdays, family backgrounds, etc.

She asks what month my birthday is in. I tell her.

"Oh!" she exclaims knowingly. "We're Fire Signs. No wonder!"

"No wonder what?"

"No wonder there's so much of [ whatever ] between us." (I think she referred to some sort of cosmic energy or personal electricity, something like that. Something indicating a good impedance match.)

I came very close to making a dismissing comment like "You don't really believe all that horoscope bullshit, do you?" But instead, I wisely held my tongue.

In subsequent conversations, I found out very quickly that she is not an astrology nut of the certifiably insane variety; nor particularly religious or spiritual in any conventional way. She's a geek, after all, which means there's a certain amount of core logic in her brain that accepts the fundamental ascendancy of bosonic reality over daily horoscopes and fortune cookies.

Nevertheless, women are plugged into a little different kind of universe than men are. They can pick up vibrations at wavelengths that the male antenna, being only six inches long, cannot pick up.

Over subsequent days and weeks, we never talked about astrological signs, but I started thinking about the various forces that brought the two of us together (an unlikely pairing, seemingly instantiated by random happenstance). And I started to wonder whether higher forces -- "the stars," the universe, God, whatever -- might be at work after all, since I had no better explanation for some of the really odd coincidences that seemed to keep putting us on the same path.

I don't read horoscopes, don't believe in them, never will. But sometimes I talk to my lady-friend on the phone at night, standing on my back porch. And when we finish talking for the night, I invariably (if it's a clear night) take one final look up at the stars, just to marvel at them.

And you know what? Sometimes I feel them looking back.

Then I go inside, throw my empty beer can in the trash, flop on the bed, and smirk, shaking my head.

Naw.