COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:Smell a Rat? It’s me

Big holiday weekend. Not Presidents Day — the Chinese New Year, which starts today. Are you excited? So am I. By the way, this is the year 4705 on the Chinese calendar, so it’s later than you think.

Since no one cares that much about Presidents Day — except for the three-day weekend for which we are deeply grateful; George, Abe, you’re the best, seriously — I thought I’d check out the Chinese New Year, which I’ve never really understood, other than reading about the Year of the Rabbit or the Year of the Dragon on a placemat now and then.

What does all that mean? Wait, let me tell you. Ready? This is fascinating, sort of.

Legend has it that the traditional Chinese calendar was invented in 2637 BC by Emperor Huangdi. That seems like a pretty darn precise date for a legend, but let’s set that aside for now. As one would expect, the Chinese calendar is complicated, as in, really complicated. It’s an astrological system that organizes time into 12 year-long blocks in recurring cycles of 60 years. Not to worry. I don’t know what it means either.

Each year in a block of 12 is represented by an animal, starting with the Year of the Rat, then the Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and lastly, the Pig, also called the Boar, which depends on how much personality your pig has, I guess. Today, the Year of the Dog ends and the Year of the Pig begins, for better or worse.

According to feng shui master Alion Yeo, if having babies is your thing, the Year of the Pig is your year.

“The Pig symbolizes birth according to Chinese tradition,” Yeo told the Associated Press in Hong Kong, “so the Year of the Pig is especially good for having babies.” See? There’s more to feng shui than just turning that family room couch around. “Pigs also represent wealth and fortune,” Yeo said. “In the old days, we believed the fatter you were, the wealthier you were.”

Darn it. Born too late again. People would have thought I was loaded.

But is this just any Year of the Pig? It is not, I tell you. This is the start of a new 60-year cycle, which makes this the Year of the Golden Pig.

Do you know what that means? It means that the Year of the Pig is a doubly good year for having babies, triply maybe. As always in China, with the population nearing 1.4 billion, what might be a trend in another country is a tsunami in China. Hospitals across China are bracing themselves for a hectic year and a full-on assault by women who want a baby with a 2007 label. But some Chinese astrologers and feng shui masters are saying, “Just hold on there, Porky — this is not a Golden Pig year at all, but a Fire Pig year.”

Obviously, that is a huge difference. You got your one pig that’s gold and your other pig that’s on fire. This is serious. The dissenters believe that calling this the Year of the Golden Pig is not only inaccurate, but a deliberate, cynical ploy by jewelers and other merchants to hype all things gold for the next year. I am shocked. That kind of thing would never happen here.

Do you know why there is no cat among the 12 animal symbols? Folklore always has its quirks, but this one is the bell ringer. The legend is that Buddha ordered all the animals in the world to come to a meeting and that he would designate the first 12 beasties to arrive as the signs of the year. The night before the big critter conference, the cat and the rat agreed that the first one to wake up the next morning would wake the other up so they could head for the meeting together. Don’t ask. Maybe they only had one map, maybe they wanted to share a cab — who knows?

But the rat, being a rat, wakes up first and scurries off to the big meeting like, well, a rat. By the time the cat wakes up, gets dressed and races to the meeting, it’s all over, done, finito — all the years have been named. Supposedly, that’s why cats hate rats and mice, although I don’t understand how the mouse got dragged into this since he had nothing to do with it.

So imagine my surprise when I checked on my own birth year, which was a while ago, only to find that I was born in the Year of the Rat. That is so unfair. The Dragon would have been very cool. The Horse or the Dog would have been great. I’d even be fine with the Pig at this point. But no, I am a Rat, which is even more ironic because everyone has an irrational fear, and rats are mine.

All right, here we go, you be the judge: Supposedly, people born in the Year of the Rat tend to be aggressive, ambitious, power-hungry, generous, quick to anger (boy, that makes me mad) and prone to spend freely. They tend to be imaginative and charming but can be overly critical. They are well suited for sales work or working as a writer (I’m not making this up), a critic or a publicist. Rats get along well with Dragons and Monkeys but they should avoid Horses. OK fine. But I still don’t like it. I don’t see why I can’t be something else. I’m telling you, the cat was right.

I gotta go.