by Luis Prada

The bully that picked on you in the third grade may have turned you into a timid 30-year-old, and your father’s love of alcohol made you the angry guy who’s a drag at parties, but those factors are more on the nurture side of life. Nature plays a big role in shaping you into the weird idiot you are today, and nature’s influence goes beyond the color of your eyes and the length of your nose. As it turns out, when you were born plays a big role in determining the kind of person you’ll be.

It may sound too much like a farmer’s almanac written by a sheep-diddling recluse who thinks a harsh winter is a punishment sent down from the angry god of corn fields and sheep-diddling, but the numbers don’t lie.

1) People Born In May Think They’re Lucky

The goatee was a strange choice for a girl, we admit

Luck is unquantifiable. There isn’t a gland under your armpit that can have its pus drained, weighed, and measured to determine how much more luck you have compared to a billionaire or a guy that survived a railroad spike in the brain. You either think you’re lucky or you don’t, and your perception of your own luck seemingly depends on nothing other than how aware you are of the patterns of good and bad events in your life…unless you were born in the month of May.

In 2004, a study of 40,000 people found that people born in the month of May consider themselves luckier than people born in any other month of the year. Conversely, people born in October considered themselves unlucky. The lead researcher, who in articles simply goes by the friendly title Prof. Wiseman like he’s trying to get his own kid-friendly edutainment show on PBS, believes it may have to do with the parents of the child being happier during the summer months, which rubs off on the child. The better a person’s attitude the more resilient they are when life’s obstacles attempt to derail their goals. Outside of that hypothesis, though, there really isn’t a solid explanation for why people born in certain months feel luckier than others overall.

Of course, more researcher and larger studies would have to be done in order to claim with absolute certainty that being born in May means you think you’re luckier. Or you can just do it yourself by looking for people that fart rainbows out of their asses that randomly rocket propel them toward pots of gold krugerrands and asking them what month they were born in.

2) Kids Born in August More Likely Not To Go To A University

But with a mustache like that, she’s bound to succeed regardless

If you’re in your 7^th year of community college right now, reading this article as you peer over the shoulder of a classmate, who you’re fairly certain is a drug dealer looking to get a degree in philosophy, you should probably consider tucking away your self-pity and blame the fact that you were born in August for why Harvard never knocked down your door with bags full of money and a tape measure for your inevitable cap and gown.

When a child is born in August it means they’ll be the youngest in their class once they head off to school. Being the youngest means they aren’t as mentally developed and as ready to soak in information as someone born even a couple of months earlier. Statistically, the August kids will be playing catch-up for their entire educational careers, always a step behind those suck up, brown-nosing January-through-July smarty-pants know-it-alls, who will eventually be getting into Harvard on a full scholarship. This leads to August babies being less likely to make it into a university post-high school.

The study, which examined the records of 48,500 teenaged students in England, found that August babies were 20% less likely to get into a university than kids born in the previous 11-months. As with most things that suck about you, you can partially blame your parents for not recognizing this simple disadvantage. In a previous study, the same researchers found that the parents of August children eventually tried to make up for their children’s mental disparity by reading to them more often, but this usually happened well into the school year, after the parents realize their kid was way dumber than any of the others and had no severe head trauma to heap the blame on to.

3) Spring Babies Become Tall Adults

May you grow like the mighty sunflower, baby

Spring is the time of year when the flowers bloom and your allergies turn your nose into a war zone. And, if you have a baby during the spring, there’s a good chance he or she will sprout into a might sequoia of a human, towering over all of their adult friends. And by towering I mean “will be around .23 inches taller, on average.”

Some science folks from the University of Vienna studied a half-million male soldiers and found that their heights had something to do with the time of year they were born in. Like a tiny weed getting direct sunlight, a person born in the spring time grows taller over the years when compared to people born during any other time of year – and that’s not just an attempt to make a second lame-ass reference to growth/spring/plants. The researchers actually think sunlight makes spring babies grow taller, even if they aren’t buried up to their legs in dirt and are regularly stepped on by careless annoying kids that just won’t get off the damned lawn!

Granted, it’s only 0.23-inches taller, which makes about as much of a difference in height as doing a half-assed job of standing on your tipy-toes as you reach for a box of Lucky Charms, but try convincing anyone that’s taller than you by any measure that any amount of advantage is a bad thing. Without that advantage, even if it’s only .23-inches, they wouldn’t feel as superior to you as they do. Who would want to give that up?

4) Summer Babies More Likely To Have Vision Problems As Adults

Are you sure your vision’s not obscured by the beard?

Yay! You were born in the summer! That means your birthday will be sunny and warm and all of your friends will think you’re soooooo cool when you throw your annual Slip-n-Slide birthday bash spectacular in your backyard!

Yeah, well, enjoy being the cool “summer birthday kid” in town while you can, because soon your eye sight will diminish rapidly and by the time you’re in your late teens and early twenties, your ability to see things from afar will be about as strong as the friendships you were able to maintain because everyone got too old for Slip-n-Slide.

Babies born in June and July have a 24% greater chance of becoming near-sighted adults than those born in less sunny months like December and January. Lead researcher Michael Belkin of Tel Aviv University’s Goldschleger Eye Research Institute, who conducted the research study on over 300,000 young adults, thinks it has to do with longer exposure to sunlight over the course of a life time, and living in a less sunny area like, say, Seattle — where gloomy, cloudy days are the norm – doesn’t even matter. Just being born at a time when the sun is at its brightest for only a few months longer than someone else causes the sun’s rays to stab into your eyes with a malevolence only reserved for main characters in revenge movies.

If you were born in the summer months, you don’t have to worry about ever looking directly at the sun and possibly harming yourself, because the sun will find you and it will destroy you for having the audacity to be born when it was most prominent. The sun is petty and easily made jealous like that.

5) Babies Born In Winter Prone To Obesity As An Adult

See, you totally thought we’d give him a Santa beard, but we outflanked you

When winter comes, skinny people are the first to start piling on the layers and bitch about how they can’t believe there are people in the world that actually enjoy, let alone live in, cold climates. While the skinny shiver like terrified teacup yorkies hiding from a thunderstorm under a pile of laundry, the obese are hoping people aren’t too put off by their bare chest and short shorts as they finally, for the first time all year, don’t feel like they’re drowning in their own sweat. It’s just too bad that the one time of year they feel the most comfortable with the weather is also the time of year that sets them up for a life of man-boob pit stains.

After examining 1,750 men and women born between 1920 and 1930 in Hertfordshire, England, the researchers found that when people were born when the weather got nippy they became more prone to packing on pounds as a reaction, because swallowing fiberglass insulation to regulate your internal temperature isn’t nearly as fun as swallowing sausages.

It’s not rare to see animals packing on weight during the winter to protect themselves from the lack of food supplies and general hardships of the cold. It’s a common and basic survival trait. But you’d think for a species that has learned to create fire we’d have learned to shun cakes and copious amounts of greasy foods so we don’t feel uncomfortably chilly when the sun isn’t directly on us.

We accept the freezing time and hanging from water, but come on, nobody’s shoulders are that strong