Year of the Identity Crisis

For most of my life, the placemats in Chinese food restaurants informed me that I was born during the Year of the Rat. As a child I was always kind of sad to be a rat because a lot of my friends were born during the previous year, which was the Year of the Boar. This sort of thing mattered to me when I was ten-years-old and celebrating Chinese New Year at school. If only I had been born two and a half hours earlier, I could have been a boar like my friends!

Darn my New Year's birthday!

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Recently I was joking with a friend about the Chinese zodiac. I had just learned that she was born the same year I was, and I made a comment about being happy that she was a rat and not a boar.

My friend, to my surprise, had never heard of the Chinese zodiac, so I ended up having to explain to her why I was calling her a "rat like me!" This resulted in some official google research to refresh my memory, and to my utter shock, after twenty-eight years, I found out that I am NOT a rat.

Dude.

What the Chinese food placemats failed to point out was that I was born before the Chinese New Year began in February, meaning that I?

Don't even know who I am anymore!

So here's to 2013: my first year as an informed boar!

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