Field Notes on Gemini

I always imagine Gemini as a person who walks into a room wearing James Bond–style spy glasses. Every time they zero in on a person, the inside of their glasses shows a brief profile: name, age, birth place, likes, dislikes. Kind of like those descriptions of people in the movie Amélie where the voice-over says ‘this is so-and-so, she likes cracking her knuckles, athletes who cry in disappointment, and tapping creme brûlée with the back of a spoon’. (Just to mix some movie metaphors for ya.) The Gemini brain has a great talent for quick thinking and pattern recognition; it can measure a person or situation by vibes alone.

The beauty of Gemini is that this analysis doesn’t stop at measurement. Instead of thinking ‘OK now I know everything’ and sticking to their first impression, a Gemini’s natural curiosity makes them keep listening. They are willing to (and want to) be surprised, because it’s more fun that way. They will quickly integrate new data and adapt accordingly. This tendency has made popular culture unfairly brand Geminis as ‘fake’, and that’s just not accurate. They just changed their minds.

If anything, Geminis are a bit too real, because they will say what they’re thinking aloud before they’ve really thought it through, surprising themselves as much as they surprise you. I love this, because talking with a Gemini feels like being inside their brain, and when you leave it’s like ‘that was kind of crazy but it does make sense’. You feel like you are co-reaching some sort of hypothesis, as opposed to just trying to get the other person to agree with your initial stance and thus win the argument. For Geminis, winning an argument is not the point of the argument – it’s the pleasure of exchanging ideas, of adaptation, of never being bored. This is the sign of the twins, after all – for Gemini, language bridges the gap between the whole that has been split.

This repartee is why the Gemini-Sagittarius axis is associated with comedy.1 You don’t laugh at things that are explained in a top-down way – you have to feel like you’re in on the joke. My sister, a Gemini sun (and Sag moon), once told me a dress I had packed for a wedding ‘looks like a cappuccino’. She was right, it did look like a cappuccino! She had surprised herself when she said that, just as much as she’d surprised me, which is why I was more amused than offended. It was her joke, but it existed within our exchange. If I had found out she had said this to someone behind my back, I would have been humiliated – a very different, perhaps the polar opposite, reaction (humored vs. humiliated).

Luckily for Gemini, natural wit and charisma helps them weasel right back into the good graces of people they’ve offended. But they should be careful not to overuse this skill. Everyone has their limits, including Geminis themselves. It just takes them a lot longer to realise it, because they are so intellectually nimble.

• The other night (upon my sister the Gemini’s advice), I saw the Michael Jackson biopic Michael in cinema. ‘You have to separate the art from the artist,’ she warned. Her rec, plus this review from one of my favourite music journalists Tom Breihan titled ‘I Didn’t Hate Michael’, was enough to convince me to give my self-righteousness a rest. I wish I didn’t, because I loved the movie. To be clear, the movie itself was not good – CGI chimpanzee etc etc – but the music, the music. The dancing, the stagecraft (a word I just learned). Now, every time I enjoy a Michael Jackson song, I feel guilt and shame. It turns out my Taurus-Capricorn ass is not good at holding two truths at once. Because the algorithm knew I watched the movie (of course it did), it fed me all sorts of content about how Michael Jackson might have been framed, that the alleged victims were paid off, etc etc. And as soon as I found myself starting to wonder if it was true, I threw my phone aside and thought: THINK LIKE A GEMINI. Two things can be true at once! Musical geniuses can do terrible things! You don’t need to take a side just because social media is designed in a way that encourages either-or thinking! This is a useful muscle to develop, now that Uranus will be in Gemini for the next eight years. But it’s definitely not intuitive for me. I seriously considered texting a friend saying ‘sorry, I can’t come to your party, I’m too busy holding two truths at once’.

• A Gemini friend of mine is pregnant with twins (!), and she came over for lunch on the hottest day of the year. UK architecture was not designed with this kind of heat in mind; most windows aren’t built in a way that allows you to affix in an AC unit into it. In a rush trying to finish making the best vodka sauce ever, I had the idea to move my dining table near the big window where there might be a bit more breeze, so she would be less likely to pass out from the heat. ‘Please be late,’ I texted her, and rearranged all my apartment furniture in like 10 minutes, while keeping an eye on the stove. This new configuration was way, way better than I had it before, a huge energetic shift for the better. So I kept it, and have a renewed love for my living space. Which just goes to show that sometimes, answers come to us the Gemini way – quickly, in the middle of doing seven other things, while adapting to someone or something external.

• My friend (and Gemini) Apoorva Sripathi has shifted from the great shelf offering to the great thegrounded.report. You’ll just have to go on there and read a hilarious exchange involving oil, in a format that conjures up sweet GeoCities nostalgia.

• My friend (and Gemini) Lex Hearth, DJ and writer of the Five Good Things newsletter, has a great podcast where she interviews people about their creative side quests.

• Come to the Nourished Communities food fest and get a tarot reading with me.

Until Cancer season,

Nikkitha