On the Darkside, this makes you a peevish, hypercritical a**l-retentive, with an obsession for sterile perfectionism and a pedantic fetish for detail.
ANNOYING HABITS
Punctuality
You are never, ever late; or early, for that matter. You are always exactly on time—it's not difficult. If only they'd let you run the world, you'd make sure that DBL (Deliberately Being Late) was a federal offense.
Toothpaste
In a time-locked closet in your bathroom are 3 x 365 individual prewrapped disposable toothbrushes, each loaded with the precise amount of toothpaste needed for one cleaning. Only you have the key.
Temper gauge
In your case, the gauge has to be recalibrated, as you maintain the constant inner seethe-rate you were born with. Although you can reach boiling point instantly if your patterns are disturbed, you never return to 0.
personalitypeevish, pedantic, perfectionist
OK, Virgo, you are famous for telling it like it is, so let's see if you can take what you dish out. Brightside apologists claim that, disabled by chronic perfectionism, you are just as laceratingly tough on yourself as you are on the rest of us—only on the inside, where we can't see. Yea right. Let's do a test: all Virgos are negative, tiny-hearted fusspots obsessed with detail, who do nothing but carp and criticize. What is your response? You carp and criticize (I rest my case), letting loose with that spiteful tongue, saying: a) that all Virgos are loyal, hard-working, and kind (unlike any other sun sign); and b) what is wrong with criticism anyway? And you will not be a prisoner to cant and hypocrisy. Where are those legendary analytical skills that you apply to everything but your own inner self? Can't you see the simple logical contradiction in b)? I'd let it go, but then you file another defense-viz, that you have a Zany Sense of Humor; and we all know what that means.
When you are hot on the anti-hypocrisy crusade, the first casualties are diplomacy, tact, and basic manners. If asked a simple question that anticipates the answer "No" (e.g. "Does my butt look big in this?" wink , not only do you reply, "Well, sure it does, lardass," but you kindly go on to give your estimate of exactly how much bigger than the norm it looks, in both standard and metric measurements. After a couple of bruising encounters like this, few people ask your advice about anything; that doesn't stop you giving it.
You are never wrong; but you aren’t not wrong like Leo (who just isn't, end of story); you secretly fear the possibility that you might be wrong, but will kill your firstborn rather than admit it, because you despise the weak. This means, among other things, that your first impressions are cast in stone. If you met the Boston Strangler on a good day, you'd maintain that he was a great guy, right up until they threw Old Smokey's switch; if you got off on the wrong foot with, say, St. Francis of Assisi, you'd maintain acidly and forever that he was nothing but a groundhog molester.
Possibly because no one will talk to you, and you spend a lot of time on your own, you obsess about your health. Considering the tanker loads of bleach and pallets of rubber gloves you get through, it's amazing how many diseases you contract (they're all listed in you beside copy of The Big Book of Scary Diseases You Might Have). There is no healing therapy that you haven't tried, except maybe Western scientific medicine—mainly because you suspect it might cure you, and then where would you be? You are also a sucker for cults (you've been reprogrammed six times), faux gurus (where did all you money go?), and food fads (you've tested allergic to everything except polystyrene).
For all that, you've got no soul; show you a sublime moment, and you kill it stone-dead with trivia. You don't see the rainbow because you are fretting about who's borrowed your umbrella.
b***h rating
A+. Not quite in Gemini's class, but a worthy silver medalist. Premier cru spite is let down by lumpy delivery; even slow bitchees can't fail to get the point and are liable to deck you, especially if they are Aries; the trick is to slash and run, but you always stick around to make sure the finer points have been rammed home.
Collective noun
A point of order for non-Virgos. You may find yourself, for some bizarre zodiacal reason, in a utility room full of Virgos (are you wearing clean underwear?). Bleach-fumes sear your mucous membranes, and eyes narrow as Virgos bring each other's attention to contentious subclauses. This is a Nitpick of Virgos. Look busy.
FAVE DEADLY SIN
Don't cast your eyes down modestly, shuffle your feet, and pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Oh, sin is such a filthy word it could never pass your lips, let alone cross your mind. You are the zodiac's Mary Poppins (the harpy in the books, not the sugarplum in the film): insufferably pleased with yourself, but cruelly critical of everybody else. Your sin is Vanity, the lighter side of Pride. And you do something clever with Gluttony, reversing it to make a homely little nameless sin of sucking all the joy, taste, and mouth-feel out of food.
blame your planetbusybody of the gods
You spent the whole of your honeymoon cleaning the 10-star hotel's lavatories to your exacting standards; friends invite you around for a relaxing evening listening to their favorite sounds, and you spend three hours recataloging their entire CD collection in an impenetrably complex system of your own devising (involving alphabetical, chronological, biorhythmical, and color-coded matrices); people all around you freely discuss obsessive-compulsive behavior. Is it your fault you're the only one with any idea of order in this zodiac? Not entirely; you can blame your planet. In your case: Mercury, small but neat, and nearest to the Sun.
It's a zodiacal outrage that you have to share this with Gemini; but you are not one to complain, you have never made a fuss in your life, so you just buckle down and get on with it, unlike some other star signs you could mention.
As I told Geminis, Mercury is a tricksy planet, and one of its more tricksy tricks is to be whatever will get its feet under the table. When it's with you, Virgo, Mercury comes on as a hard-working communicator, tirelessly and thanklessly serving the universe, even when specifically asked not to. It's named for the workaholic Roman god (Hermes in Greek), the one who takes on all those extra responsibilities (healing, cattle, marketplaces) because, frankly, no one else cares; he is run off his feet at the beck and call of bigger gods, especially Zeus, who couldn't tie his own shoelaces without Mercury's assistance. Sniff.
who's got your number?check out the opposition
Your polar opposite sign is Pisces: weak, confused, disorganized, and shiftless. What would a tiny-hearted, tight-sphinctered control queen like you want with a slippery, inconsistent drifter like your average Piscean? How do you have this—shall we say—understanding? Well, like good cop and bad cop, or arch villain and fixer, you need each other to make the Darkside work for you. It's all about elements (undesirable ones, of course). You are Earth; Pisces is Water. And together they make mud, which is great for slinging at the neighbors (although you have a problem with the mess).
Don't you get tired of being organized, right, and respectable all the time? Of constantly trying to hold the whole world together (because if you don't, who will)? Don't you suspect that having everything neat and tidy, done and dusted, over with before anyone's had a chance to live in the moment, is not the only way to do it? Close your eyes and be one with the zodiac's fishy duo, chilling out under a rocky ledge, their tiny attention spans caught by drifting weed, glittery insects, anything that moves.
Respect your inner Piscean; it's what makes you let go every now and then, put Mr. Fussy on hold, have a beer, and rock on the turn on life's tides. People start to think you're not such a pain in the butt after all. So do you. Don't overdo it, though (those great, glassy eyes are very hypnotic); someone's got to run the world.
sexa full service
Contrary to popular opinion, you don't not like sex, do you? In fact there are some bits of it that give you a strange, not unpleasant damp feeling. We all know you don't wear that black rubber all-in-one just to protect yourself from intimate squidginess and alien bodily fluids.
Just like you service the car, you do sex by the manual, which you read to your partner beforehand, bookmarking the more complicated passages for ease of on-the-job reference, and making sure that all the necessary tools are in good working order. Of course, you leave the lights on (why strain your eyes?); you may even video the event, as a teaching aid, so that you can show your lover precisely what they did wrong during that tricky maneuver. In the afterglow, when you've both been through the antibac shower (separately), you issue a consumer response form to fill in, then you run a quick statistical analysis on your laptop to see how it compares with previous sessions. When asked how it was for you, you deliver a comprehensive report with synopsis and bibliography.
DARKSIDE DATE
You have to ask yourself: is there anyone good enough for you out there? There probably isn't. Just as well, really; if there were, you'd have nothing to be picky about, which would really frazzle your circuitry. The most practical solution would be another Virgo; you can easily track one down through an online dating agency (to avoid loitering in the social arena, where you might catch germs). You will recognize each other easily by your cold, standoffish manner; if the chemistry kicks in, this will soon thaw into a cool, standoffish manner. Your ideal date, set up after mutual negotiations since no one wants any sudden surprises, would be an afternoon surfing the public records office, followed by an early supper at your favorite vegan hotspot, then on for some hardcore data-merging at the Obsessive-Compulsive cafe.
What kind of love rat are you?
You never dump; it's worse than that. You always want to talk about it. You look forward to the bad times, so that you can point out how your partner has reneged on the secret, unilateral pre-nup you carry in your head, and you never accept their resignation. Hag-ridden exes who try to escape are nagged to death long-distance, by text, email, phone, and letter.
IMCOMPATIBILITY RATING
Aries—you make constructive critical remarks; they slug you.
Taurus—you say austerity; they say I don't think so.
Gemini—they outbitch you and laugh at your clumsy retorts.
Cancer—will always be able to worry on a more cosmic scale than you ever can.
Leo—they despise you for having no grip on pomp and pageantry.
Virgo—knick-knack overload.
Libra—you think they are insincere hypocrites; they think you are tactless curmudgeons.
Scorpio—you suspect you will never be able to obsess to their benchmark standard.
Sagittarius—you speak as you find; they are tactless oafs.
Capricorn—your rival in the local austerity drive.
Aquarius—ships that pass in the night, on different oceans.
Pisces—appear tempting as punchbags, but always manage to dodge the knockout blow.
relationshipsyou're on your own
No one can live up to your fusspot perfectionism, not even you, so relating on any level is very fraught, and living with you is far too irritating. Once, you tried to make it work by targeting people dimmer than you, because you thought you could impose your system on them without them noticing. Now you realize that you are better off stalking around alone with your tail in the air—except, of course, for the other 46 cats who share your basket, and who understand about addictive grooming and looking superior.
You want to know how you alienate people so thoroughly? It's the little things that do it (and how ironic is that?). At a party, you are the one sneering at the eggplant dip (not organic) and running a fastidious digit over the top of the door frame; or you are the one blink-drunk under the host, because the drink is free. In the days when you had friends, your posse used to plan nice simple nights out: a couple of beers, maybe a pizza; but your faddy food fascism meant that evenings always ended early in a dank, beige-walled, alcohol-free, macrobiotic restaurant, with them watching tight-lipped as you toyed with your miso royale; then they had to wait 45 minutes while you scrupulously divided the check.
What you really want from a friend, or lover, or partner is a punchbag; someone who will just twist slowly and passively in the air while you hurl critical right hooks, snide uppercuts, and scathing straight lefts, followed by a pummeling of general put-downs: a real nitpicker's workout.
workyou don't want to do it like that
You love work, because if it wasn't for work, you would have to talk to your family, and get a life. And bosses love you (at least to begin with): you are the perfect lackey, always ready at the moment's notice to put in extra weekends or cancel the luxury vacation of a lifetime, for which you have saved for years, to sort out an urgent logistical problem in the stationery cupboard. You love to serve somebody. It's your way of controlling the hideous randomness of the universe.
It's not the money, it's the status and respect you crave. And if you don't feel valued, you avenge yourself with spite, sarcasm, bitchery, backbiting, gossipmongering, petty politicking, and snitching on juniors who use the photocopier for nonwork-related purposes.
Colleagues can't believe their luck when you first show up, because you can be counted on to do all the dull, boring routine jobs (you think they are exciting, stimulating routine jobs). They are soon turned off you, though, because your abject slavishness makes them look slack, and nobody loves a smart-a**.
Eventually, bosses realize that you put in long hours not because you are forging ahead and taking the company with you, but because you are mired in detail: you spend at least an hour every morning color-coding your erasers. But they can't fire you: you have made yourself indispensable, because you are the only one who understands the database, which you set up, since you were the only one who could be bothered to read the manual.
DREAM JOBS
Let's make this quite clear, you are far too busy to idle away your employer's precious time fantasizing about dream jobs, and if you catch anyone else doing so, you will only be doing your duty if you shop them to the boss. However, on your tofu break, consider:
forensic accountant
Long, hot days at your desk spent nitpicking your way through ancient records, tracing ingenious patterns of creative fraudulence made by people whose attention to detail was awesome, but can't touch yours.
Censor
Mixes prudery, perversion (your very secret vice), grading, and telling others what they should think, in one absorbing activity. And don't you just love the patterns the blue pencil makes on a virgin manuscript.
crimes and misdemeanorshow bad could it get?
So what sort of criminal would you be, if sociopathy became the new world order? How would you spend your days (or maybe nights) if you really lived on the Darkside? Very successfully: you are neat, clever with your hands, and can be relied on never to leave clues behind. You'd make an excellent lockpick, and an even better nonexplosive safe cracker (all those combinations to untangle). And you are, of course, in demand as a clean-up man/woman, sent round to retrieve the situation when hits go wrong.
You wear gloves as a matter of course, and would never leave a fingerprint in the dust because you would never leave any dust (even if the slobs whose place it is haven't cleaned): you always back a telescopic feather duster.
You respect the law because you respect any attempt to bring order from chaos, but feel that it should concentrate on the things that really matter, like litterbugs—felons in your eyes.
In court you conduct your own defense (you're not paying those lawyers' fees); you drone on about precedents, torts, and stuff, until judge and jury are so ground down they let you off. But you often get let off earlier on, because you look so well presented (but then, so did the Nazis). On the rare occasions you are locked up, prison staff dread it, because you know your rights and cause endless paperwork demanding them. You quite like doing solitary—just as well, since the wardens don't take kindly to you pointing out each time they bend a regulation.
WHEN VIRGINS GO WRONG
You lack the overview to be a criminal mastermind, but you are great at detailed planning and all the dull bits that masterminds don't bother with; however, you have a fatal tendency, when you have the cops cornered, to stop and explain your entire evil plan, instead of just getting away.
Forger
A job that requires no imagination, but meticulous attention to detail, working slowly and methodically to recreate perfect but illegitimate versions of bills, coins, great art, etc.; it's what you were born for.
Serial killer
It's not bloodlust, it's the pattern, you see; the victims are an irrelevance, for your thrill comes from devising an MO and a sequence so complex and baffling that lawmen from 51 states cannot decode it. Ha!
at homeisolation ward
You are rarely troubled by visitors—at least, not more than once. Some people find the decontamination chamber on your porch a bit difficult to operate; or perhaps it's the fitted plastic covers on the furniture, or the plastic wrap stretched hygienically across the lavatory or the sight of your minivac snug in its holster on your hip, ready to waste any speck. Which is a shame, because you are nearly always pleased to receive guests (by prior appointment)—even dinner guests, as long as they eat up their lentilles marinieres as soon as they hit the plate, and then leave, because you need to get everything into the sterilizer a.s.a.p.
DOMESTIC DISHARMONY
Aries—they refuse point-blank to keep their meat rations out in the toolshed.
Taurus—think it's perfectly normal to eat three times a day, rather than just the once.
Gemini—they hide the manuals to all your electronic goods.
Cancer—whenever you throw anything away, they bring it back in for their collection.
Leo—no faith in your cleaning skills, so they bring in a pro.
Virgo—constantly tut-tutting under their breath about your filing system not being compatible with theirs.
Libra—spend hours in the bathroom, but never take the bleach in with them.
Scorpio—secretly destroy your more pointless knick-knackery.
Sagittarius—they invite all their buddies around and accidentally trample all your footstools.
Capricorn—you both sit in the cold, unwilling to be the first to switch the heating on.
Aquarius—study your habits as if you were an alien life form.
Pisces—make a terrible mess, but get around you be pretending to listen to your advice.
Decor
As you have a morbid fear of bright colors, including beige, all the walls in your house are white. That way you can spot the minute they get dirty. You don't hang things on the walls, because it might make marks, but create plenty to interest with your sea of low-level footstools and occasional tables (many of them covered in small, ugly ornaments) arranged in that special configuration of yours.
Sharing the Virgo enclave
Few make it past the compulsory 30-page questionnaire; and you find that those who do are often reluctant to submit to the twice-daily room inspection, or try to refuse to take their turn at the weekly regrouting of the bathroom tiles.
playtimethe darkside of fun
As far as you're concerned, the best bit about any vacation—if you must take one—is planning how you are going to fly goat-class, take enough chickpea sandwiches to last for 10 days, and spend even less than you did last year, when you gleefully brought back all your spending money untouched, mostly because you bumped into an old Taurean friend. But you acknowledge that there are advantages to an all-in package, preferably somewhere damp: while the family is at the beach, you can spend quality time calculating whether you are getting your money's worth, and if you're not (oh joy), you can have satisfactory complaining sessions with the rep.
What would really suit you is a trip somewhere you can pick up a couple of unusual foreign diseases: something recurrent and comfortably incurable, preferably with a distinctive rash, so that you can get in with the in-crowd down at Hypochondriacs Anonymous.
Vacations from hell
* Chilling out at a faraway retreat where you cannot plug in a laptop, alongside laid-back Libra; you don't do relaxing and you know the office would fall apart without your daily data input.
* Rio at carnival time with Leo and Gemini; noise, bright colors, fun, potential adventures—far too disorganized.
* .
Road rage
You have memorized all the rules of the road, including all the updates, and will not hesitate to advise other motorists where they are going wrong, and which bylaw they are breaking. Some of you have got a removable flashing blue light that you put on your car roof to make it easier to flag them down. You are hurt and upset when you give you the finger, or ram you, or when you are arrested for impersonating a police officer. You always memorized the route, and a few possible alternatives in case of unforeseen holdups, but bring the map anyway, folded and stored in a plastic, wipeable wallet.
Gamesmanship
You know all the rules to every known game, and frequently hold up play while you explain them to the ref, umpire, and teammates. You never let anyone play with your ball in case it gets dirty, so you always take it home with you in the plastic bag in which you brought it.
