If one goes out for lunch in my town, one will run into lots mom/young child(-ren)/grandma combinations-- three generations out for the afternoon. Like many sociologists, I have a strong interest in (a) what makes people "tick" and ( how they interact. I thus spend a lot of time listening in on other peoples' conversations when I'm out and about. It's second nature for me at this point. During my latest lunch outing, my attention was especially drawn to a few things. In modern times, ...

I was excited to discover that this is the Year of the Rooster by the Chinese zodiac system. I'm not much for the "science" of horoscopes, but any tradition that's nearly 5000 years old is inherently neat-o in my book. The complexity of the system is really cool, too. Instead of a simple 12-month/year-based cycle, there's a 12-YEAR cycle interspersed with five subsets for each of the twelve intervals. Thus, as a rooster-earth person, it's actually really only "my year" twice in my lifetim...