Linda Goodman's Sun Signs

by Linda Goodman

  The GEMINI Child

  “Will you walk a little faster?”

  said a whiting to a snail,

  “There’s a porpoise close behind us,

  and he’s treading on my tail.”

  If the stork just delivered a Gemini baby to your house, sharpen your roller skates and shake the cobwebs out of your brain. You’ll need to be fast and alert for the next fifteen to twenty years, and you might as well start right now, while your little bundle from Mercury is still pinned down in his crib. It won’t be long before he learns to walk and talk. If you’re not ready to fly beside him, he may slip in and out of your fingers like a glob of air. Did you ever try to hold on to a glob of air?

  The U.S. Census Bureau figures prove that there are more multiple births during the period of Gemini, the twins, than at any other time of the year. So your June event might have been twins—or more. No? Don’t be too sure. You may be able to count only ten toes and ten fingers, which adds up to one infant in most cases, but not necessarily in the case of a Gemini infant. There may have to be a change in your concept of mathematics. You’ll see what I mean soon enough when he starts to crawl. It will happen a dozen times a day. You’ll swear you just this second saw him with his hand inside the electric mixer in the pantry. But how could that be? There he is, all the way out on the front porch, blissfully chewing the petunias. How can he be two places at once? Remember that your offspring is ruled by Mercury. He’s that Greek god you see pictured in books with wings on his feet, wearing a bright, silver helmet. Stick a kitchen pan upside down on your Gemini baby’s head for a helmet, and use your imagination for the wings sprouting out of his chubby little pink heels. See the resemblance?

  I have never personally approved of those harness-like attachments they sell to mothers to strap around their toddlers when they take them out shopping. It always makes me think the woman is walking her dog. However, I would strongly advise the mother of a Gemini child to buy two or three of them, just to be on the safe side.

  Your first thought might be that, if baby is going to be that active, a sturdy playpen is a must. I can see your logic, even sympathize with it, but I’m not so sure about playpens and Gemini children. Confinement in a small space can amount to cruelty with a little Geminian, whose entire nature urges him to seek, to explore, to learn. Even worse than the physical curtailment is the mental boredom of being stuck on one little blue and pink plastic rectangular pad, with the whole exciting world out there to see and enjoy. Periods of being cooped up in a playpen should be brief. Too much restriction and hampering of the Geminian freedom can lead to emotional depression he may not outgrow so easily. Remember, he’s an air sign, and air must move. Make sure he has a variety of toys and plenty of bright books to look at when you must keep him fenced in.

  Of course, he won’t stay there long, once he’s had it. Mercury rules the vocal chords, and when your little Gemini tot decides to exercise his talent in this direction, you’ll wonder how all that noise could possibly come out of one, small mouth. Bet you take him out of the playpen fast. Unless you have understanding neighbors, who are a little hard of hearing.

  Gemini children often make older, more placid people nervous with their bird-like, quick movements. Grownups are always telling the little Geminian to stop fidgeting, or to be patient and do one thing at a time. But doing two things at a time is natural to these youngsters. What stodgy or poised people call fidgety is, to the Gemini, merely his normal state of activity. It’s wrong to make him feel he would get more approval if he tried to imitate the slower, less lively people. He should be taught to slow down a little, perhaps, for his own good, but his basic nature can’t be changed without frustrating his natural inclinations. We should try to remember that the quick Gemini child who annoys his more introverted elders—and the quiet, careful Capricorn child who irritates his more aggressive elders, are simply being themselves. Being yourself is always hard enough to do, without people trying to force a personality change.

  Love your Gemini child for what he is—a friendly, alert inquisitive and precocious little person. You can’t turn the firefly into a snail or the snail into a firefly. Nor can the leopard change his spots. I might add that, if someone tries to scrub them off, he’ll be a mighty unhappy, neurotic leopard.

  Of course, you aren’t raising leopards. You’re raising a bright, interesting, enthusiastic child. But the analogy is logical. Let those spots of duality in your Gemini youngster remain. Someday he may make you proud of a building he designed and a literary prize he won; and when he manifests such a double talent, you’ll wonder why you ever tried to stamp him into a single mold. If he leaps about as though he has jumping beans inside him he’s just practicing the fast reflexes he was born with. His firefly mind can confuse you, but remember that it’s pursuing a thousand fancies, sorting them, deciding which to discard and which to treasure.

  Teachers will usually notice right away that these boys and girls have no trouble learning to read. Gemini almost invented words. They won’t mind being called on to recite, and they may smile as the rest of the students sigh, when a theme is assigned. These youngsters delight in communicating with others and sharing their knowledge verbally or on paper. Many of them are mechanically inclined and ambidextrous. It’s not unusual to find a Gemini child who writes with his left hand and draws with his right. He may bite his nails, but his fingers are normally slim and flexible, which makes him adept at magic tricks and playing musical instruments. Someday it could make him a fine surgeon, dentist or watchmaker. Gemini hands are sensitive, expressive and capable.

  There’s usually a marked ability to mimic others. The Gemini sense of sharp wit and satire appears early. At home or in school, the Gemini child lives in a world of make-believe and reality, constantly blending, where truth is often portrayed as fantasy, and fantasy is disguised as truth. He may give the impression of exaggerating or even telling lies. But he just can’t help splashing a little color around when he’s relating an incident, and he often convinces himself it really happened that way. At such times, he should be handled gently, since he’s actually stretching and exercising his vivid imagination. Rather than make him feel guilty for having an imagination, he should be told always to speak the truth and write the story down on paper. Once he masters this, he’ll be able to see the difference between the dream and the fact, instead of being lost somewhere between the two worlds. Gemini youngsters who aren’t allowed to express and communicate naturally may retreat into a half-world of illusion in self-defense. It’s a good idea to start him on foreign languages early—which he’ll probably learn effortlessly. Like the Sagittarius child, he’ll find bi-lingual talents will come in handy because he’ll talk a lot and travel a lot.

  The Gemini child who argues with you that he can do his homework and listen to the radio at the same time, is probably telling the truth. If his grades back him up, why not? Geminis are never satisfied with one pursuit at a time. It’s as if they had two lives to live in only one lifetime, so they must absorb all they can, as fast as they can. The chief dangers are a lack of patience and an unwillingness to persist until a thing is thoroughly learned. These youngsters have to be discouraged from a tendency to let their quick intellects and glib wits skim over knowledge without completely understanding it.

  Your Gemini child may find it hard to be punctual, because he’s always running into some new discovery on his way to anywhere. He may also find it hard to listen without interrupting, because he’s caught the thought instantly and doesn’t want to hear the details. He may tend to repeat himself, but he won’t allow you to do so, which quite naturally may irritate people. In the classroom, he can be distracted by a fly, a piece of colored paper or a wisp of smoke outside the window. It’s never easy to get his attention, but when you do, you’ll be richly rewarded by the Geminian’s intent curiosity and flattering interest.

  Your teenage Gemini boy will practically live on his cell phone, go steady with a different person each week,
change his mind a hundred times about his future career, drive the car a little too fast, putter with the engine and fix your washer. The girls will be popular and be able to turn on a shower of tears or a sunny smile like a light switch. These youngsters will keep you on your toes and keep you young.

  When your Gemini child finally grows up, lots of people will tell you disapprovingly that “he has too many fingers stuck in too many pies.” You’ll smile then, and they may be annoyed. But you’ll be remembering one spring day when he was seven. He stuck his fingers in your chocolate pies, his father’s shaving cream, the fish bowl, the garbage can, a pot of hot soup and an electric socket. You were furious. Later, at twilight, you watched him run around chasing lightning bugs in the grass. After a while, you sighed, and asked yourself aloud, “Why must he rush around so? Why must he get into everything? What in the world is he searching for?” He overheard you and it troubled him. You’ll never forget the look in his bright, clear eyes when he answered. “Gee, Mommy … I don’t know. But don’t you worry. I’ll find it.”

  The GEMINI Boss

  He said, “I look for butterflies

  that sleep among the wheat

  I make them into mutton-pies,

  And sell them in the street.

  I sell them unto men,” he said,

  “Who sail on stormy seas;

  And that’s the way I get my bread—

  A trifle, if you please.”

  One day your Gemini boss will be a walking clock, whose camera eye records each second you take past your coffee break. On another, she won’t even notice if you come back three hours late from lunch. You can try flipping a coin to predict her changes. It’s about as safe as anything else. I realize that it would be a big help to know which day she’s going to take what attitude.

  But the Gemini executive doesn’t know himself which side of the bed she’s going to get out on each morning, and since she doesn’t know, you can see why I can’t tell you. The safest way is not to expect her to be today what she was yesterday, and cross your fingers about tomorrow.

  This woman can be a brilliant, though restless, executive. She’s more at home in the president’s chair than the other mutable signs of Virgo, Pisces or Sagittarius would be, but she’s not equipped to command or lead others for her entire lifetime. A Gemini who thinks she’s constituted to run a large company with calm assurance is just kidding herself (always considering the exceptions to the rule, like a Sun sign Gemini with a Leo ascendant and a Libra Moon, for example). In the first place, it’s hard for her to sit still behind a desk for more than an hour at a time. President Kennedy, one of the rare Geminis equipped to take on the burdens of leadership, solved that problem neatly. He simply released his nervous energy by making his rocking chair fly.

  Your Mercury-ruled boss must move around. Gemini is an air sign, and did you ever see air stand still? It may seem to sometimes on a hot, humid day (and so will a Gemini if you catch him in a rare moment), but that’s only an illusion in both cases. The typical Gemini boss will wear a hole in the carpet pacing up and down, if she’s caged up in an office too long. She’s happier as a management consultant, an efficiency expert or a vice president in charge of trouble-shooting, than when she’s forced into the confining mold of a nine-to-five position, no matter how fancy the title. She deals with ideas, principles and abstractions. The humdrum and material responsibilities of the average executive eventually depress her soaring spirit. Therefore, when a Gemini parachutes herself into an executive spot, she’ll be quick to exercise her acute discrimination and delegate authority to others around him. These carefully chosen specialists will really run the business, freeing her own restless mind for progressive schemes and original plans that will double the company’s profit and lower its overhead. She’s impatient with dull, mundane details.

  If your company just hired a Gemini as your superior you can expect some changes to be made in short order. The slowest form of communication around the place will probably be emails, and he may require a few more buttons on his telephone than her predecessor. Your new Gemini boss won’t be on the job a week before she’s inquisitively poked around into every area of the operation. As soon as she learns what’s being done and how it’s being done, she’ll want to know why. The answer, “We’ve always done it this way,” will cause her bright eyes to turn to ice cubes that could freeze you at thirty paces. Gemini is not even slightly interested in or impressed with tradition. When she’s told something is an old custom, that’s reason enough for her to change it. The typical Mercury boss will have the furniture moved around frequently, drive her assistant into a fit of the fidgets once a week with a new idea for a filing system that will work more efficiently, and change the work schedules back and forth until she finds ones that clicks with her.

  There’s one thing you can count on, and one of the few things you can count on consistently with a Gemini. She will never be monotonous. She’ll seldom be dogmatic either. Her opinions are flexible. You can’t mislead her or confuse the issue, because her quicksilver mind will instantly reduce the frills, penetrate the smoke screens and expose all sides of the question with crystal clarity. That means she also exposes office intrigues with little difficulty. Sometimes you’ll swear he has eyes in the back of his head—and an extra pair of ears there, too. Speaking of her anatomy and such, it’s even hard to credit him with just one pair of feet, since there will be plenty of occasions when she appears to be two places at once.

  Never fear that your Gemini employer will hate you or be your enemy. Few people interest her long enough for that kind of intensity. You won’t be in her thoughts for more than an hour or so at a time. That’s not long enough to work up any violent feelings, for or against. Besides, he has a pretty fair understanding about how the other person feels.

  It may puzzle you to discover that, although your Gemini employer is an individualist in every way, she may not treat you as an individualist. It seems inconsistent, but then this is a dual sign, with more than one surprise. I don’t mean that she won’t respect your individual opinions. She will. It’s just that she doesn’t always see you personally as an individual. The Geminian mind is so abstract that he often sees only basic designs in both objects and people. All kinds of people are fascinating to her, but she tends to categorize them according to their abilities, ideas and potential.

  Yet this odd viewpoint doesn’t make her unattractive as a human being. Quite the contrary. Even though her approach is far more rational than emotional, she likes people so much, they just can’t help liking her back. Without the constant challenge of human contact, she would dry up and float away. Mercury demands that she be gregarious and live vicariously or be miserable. You’ll rarely see her by herself. She may classify people by types and remain detached emotionally, but she needs them around.

  Your Gemini boss will probably have considerable powers of persuasion. She can wheedle you into or talk you out of most anything, simply by dousing you with a bucket of that irresistible charm and wit of hers. But it’s a compensating talent he was given by the planets at birth, that hides a basic coldness of nature. Gemini lives in vague, airy palaces in the sky the average person can’t reach. Her true character, despite her surface warmness, is cool, aloof and lonely, in the final analysis, searching for something inside herself more than from others, no matter how frequently she seeks their company. Yet, she’s not unsympathetic. Her manner can be gentle and compassionate, but at the same time, she offers sympathy and understanding the same way she offers love and friendship—from a distance.

  She’ll have an excellent sense of humor, and you can win her over with a joke more quickly than with tears. She’s not overly sentimental, but she’ll always see the ridiculous side of things. A sense of humor is a prerequisite to true intelligence, so it’s not surprising to find it in the Mercury people, though sometimes it may be tinged with sharp sarcasm. There will always be a slight whirl of confusion around a Gemini-run office—and constant activity. But
she won’t be the one who is confused. Gemini sorts it all out and clears the muddy waters of all the gunk. Her quick eye and trigger fast brain work in perfect synchronization. The eye will probably have a twinkle in it. She’ll be the company’s best salesperson, make speeches and entertain a lot. And she’ll probably travel so much, she may keep a suitcase ready to fly at a moment’s notice.

  Enjoy this boss while you can, because Geminis get suddenly bored after they’ve made financial or business successes, and they rush off to the next challenge long before retirement time. Before she goes, learn what you can about her strategy. It’s really fantastic. She’s an expert at double talk. She’ll run around an argument in circles, mix you up, turn you around, then win you over to her side before you realize what’s happened. Yet, as clever as she is in competitive situations, she’s still an incurable dreamer, and a smashingly good storyteller. Pay no attention to what nationality she says he is. Whether she was born in Israel, Australia or Afghanistan, every single Gemini in the world is Irish at heart. How else could he possess such a wonderful gift of blarney? Notice all those green sweaters she wears. What did I tell you—pure County Cork.

  The GEMINI Employee

  “The time has come,” the Walrus said,

  “To talk of many things;

  Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—

  Of cabbages—and kings—

  And why the sea is boiling hot—

  And whether pigs have wings.”

  Yet, what can one poor voice avail

  Against three tongues together?