Personality.
What did they say about the last little piggy? He laughed all the way home?
I opened this page and then promptly neglected it after writing two entire questions. Wow. Way to be distracted.
I was just looking through some old text files, many of which I haven't finished sorting into a more organized fashion. At best they are currently semi-organized. That's better than just a mess of files in a single folder with names that are, at best, archaic. Plus I've named them something that in most cases has something to do with the content. Unlike certain people who email me with subject lines that have nothing to do with the content of the email. Which makes organizing email utterly useless. This ties into what I was planning to write about tonight. I know the general sentiment is that younger folks tend to not waste time sorting emails. I don't bother with it at work, mostly because I don't have enough time to between calls (there is virtually no time between calls these days anyway) and it's way easier to search the inbox than sorting it into folders I mostly don't use while on the clock.
I found one detailing the "origin" of the name of a, I might say character, but really it was just the handle I went by on that particular MOO (if you aren't that old or geeky think of it was a text-based virtual world/chat but more interactive with virtual objects you could look at/manipulate and rooms you could move between) which I know I made up on the spot when this one total stranger asked me where my name came from.
The original story for that specific name was from a fifty-five word story.
Which I then proceeded to blow into...no less than several paragraphs (I haven't finished reading it yet) of zaniness. This particular story was like a "reboot" of the fifty-five word original micro-short story.
Concocting zany stories on a whim in that MOO (or one of two others I visited at the time, when MOOs were starting to die) was one of the things I thoroughly enjoyed. If I was able to drag in other people that were there and online I did it. I remember using the regulars to create a pantheon of "gods" in jest Grecko-Roman style for no reason other than it amused me.
Or another time I had changed my name and I had described myself as a space cadet. That was another grand adventure that took me to the moon. We saw monsters there!
I need to re-commit and get my website back together with a new look. I need to rock the new supported CSS (Yay for CSS3 support!) so I can share some of this.
I may also want to consider going back and re-writing it (2.0) and making the stories available, maybe as ebooks. I downloaded a program that I could use to make iBooks (as I recall?) to view on iOS devices.
Since last night, since the very tail end of the second entry that I wrote yesterday one thing has predominantly been on my mind.
My Jungian / Myers-Briggs (or Briggs Myers? MBTI) personality type, which apparently is pretty uncommon among the general public. Yay?
It certainly shed light on some things.
Like in part why I find myself absolutely loathing people. General stupidity as I tend to think of it but after further analysis (Yes, I'm a thinker, as if you hadn't noticed by now.) well, really just a bit of additional consideration (like less than a single stride for my mind) I realized it's probably not general stupidity but that I think much faster than most people do and I'm already working out all the angles on something and figuring out the options while other people...are not. They might not even have considered where I'm coming from or what I'm thinking. Which...is frustrating for me.
Last night it was like I could comment on nearly everything I was reading going, "Yes...I can see...", "I remember doing this when I was young, that's true...", "That would be why I do this or that at work, hmm...", "That explains why I have trouble relating to people and tend to come off as cold or unemotional."
I expected to write a very long entry. Another day perhaps but not tonight. (I can't find a comfortable position to use the laptop tonight. I don't exactly want it propped on the recliner but my shorts are too slippery for the laptop to stay where I put it. The Macbook is all, "Whee, it's a slip-and-slide! I want to go to slide to the bottom!"
One of those traits you've probably seen in action is being judgmental. Oh yes. Any kind of decision or opinion arrived at by illogical or irrational means I loathe. Not plain old regular loathing but with an extra helping of loathing with a burning passion.
That's a big part of why I hate people who "like to argue" or who "like to debate" because generally? There comes a point when logic exits the scene. As soon as it leaves the scene I lose all interest. That's when I call it, it's game over.
I've described this before. I think I mentioned it when I first wrote about "troop movements" (look for the oldest entry under that tag) where I will try to have an interesting and engaging discussion that, yes, involves peoples views and opinions and as soon as I see that look in the eye where I know logic was just thrown from a window on the top floor of the highest skyscraper I quit. I recess to the shadows and wait for it to simmer out. I don't manipulate the situation (even though I could and if I had learned how to manipulate effectively) even if it might bring the rationless defenses to an end so that we can talk about something else. I prefer to leave it fizzle out, like a fire without enough fuel or oxygen.
I'm pretty certain I've written about it on at least one other occasion, maybe when I was talking about presenting a different version of myself to different people? Which...is also a personality trait of my type, mimicking other people to try and better fit in and instead of being...That Guy.
Or my hate for blind obedience (oh man, I've known about that one for ages) and my hate for social...how did I see it described the other day? It was talking about dating and hating the social or cultural...games, if you will, that goes with things like dating. OH MY GOSH! I know!
Mind you, I hadn't thought about it as in-depth as suddenly struck me--like a ton of bricks, books, or a tsunami - whichever you prefer; and speaking of tsunamis I don't know if I'd prefer to be all washed up or all washed out.
I thought using a dating website would be practical (that's that efficient and logical personality at work) but noooo! Despite messaging the ladies if I get one response but nothing after that I just stop. I take it they aren't interested and they were responding to be nice. Okay then. If you aren't interested you aren't interested. No point wasting my time in a chase that's not going anywhere. Sorry, I've already done that and what did I get for my time and trouble?
But nooo, apparently feigning disinterest is part of the game. How completely annoying, and useless and inefficient, and illogical, and...allow me to pause my outrage mid-sentence because, yeah, I see where this is going. This is a laundry-list of personality traits that are common to my personality type. Awesome.
I am definitely emotional but I don't make a habit of wearing my emotions on my sleeve. What good does that do me? I may not feel like I have a large emotional range. Have you ever noticed I tend to use the same, maybe six moods over all the years I've been writing in this journal? The repeats: tired, sleep, blah, um...? Those have been like my "go to" moods over the years.
I remember the one roommate I had who said he was really good at reading people but even he found me very difficult to read. Considering who said it I took some pride in being able to even hide from him reading me.
While I can be hard-working and determined it's a matter of having a good reason to do so. Busy-work drives me batty. Busy-work is exactly how I saw most homework assignments. I don't know how I managed to get by in school to be honest, I don't know if it was that I knew I could sit in class and try to focus on whatever the matter-at-hand was and then blow off homework. I had a study hall and sometimes I made a little dent on homework there but never at home. I didn't have a good environment at home for it.
Being locked out of the house until dinner time didn't really help with that. I wasn't going to do it at a friend's house. (Really? That would have felt weird.) After dinner I just didn't have the right home environment for it. My mom constantly argued with my dad, how was I going to get his help with homework? No offense but I wouldn't have wanted my mother's help with any of it. My dad always struck me as the smarter one. I respected my dad...uh-oh, another personality trait for my type. People who are illogical, aren't smart, or made irrational decisions we tend to lose respect for and once gone it's very difficult to earn again.
Which is why today at work I was surprising that I've been doing the same job, one that is not very well suited to my personality type for almost twice as long as the jobs I'd done before it. It's strict, I have no freedom (Hello, please treat me like an adult. I want to go to lunch when I'm...oh, I don't know, hungry!) and it's a very well defined role (boo - conformity), and I don't get to take on fun or interesting challenges that require interesting, original, or creative solutions.
That was something I really enjoyed when they started the internal message board to discuss ideas on how we could improve things. While I might not have been great at always identifying the need I could see weak ideas and could make them better or offer a superior solution. I always thought of it as being a bit like car body work, if you have a hole in the body you would use sheet metal and you could rivet it to the body that remained around the hole, then you could use Bondo to smooth out the difference in height from the sheet metal that you put over the hole and the remaining body. You'd prime it and paint it and be finished. It was like they had done a very rough fix so I'd go in and refine it, touch it up, improving it.
I haven't done that in a while. They changed the system (for the worse - sigh) so that one person proposes an idea, you vote on it, if people like it great. If not it goes nowhere. If you have a better solution or a better way you can try commenting (the comment presentation sucks for encouraging discussion - as in more than a lot, it's more like it's trying to prevent actual discussion; hello inefficiency!) but don't expect anyone to actually read it muchless you your feedback or take it to heart.
I like the company but when they...kept pushing this inferior system as the way to encourage improvements...yeah, I found myself losing interesting in the new mechanism they wanted us to use because it wasn't efficient. It helped them track it through the system but did it help encourage better ideas or help refine ideas that were actually worthy and had sufficient merit to move on? No. Instead it resulted in spam.
Yes. That's right.
A bunch of low quality ideas that are only there because people don't know how or don't care about taking full advantage of the resources that are there to help them provide high quality feedback.
Which reduces the effectiveness and success rate of great ideas getting all the way through the pipeline.
That and that phone reps are suppose to do it "between calls" but my group has been so busy the last year and a half (Nearly two years now - seriously someone (or more than one) is failing at their job and its core responsibilities. If you pick up more clients or more business ensuring you are staffed appropriately is a no-brainer. I thought it was, how is this possibly not common sense? Sigh, typical response. Just because I've thought about it (I think a lot, it's what us intuitive thinker types do) doesn't mean everyone has.) that using the improvement system is impossible.
Questioning everything.
That sounds about right.
Lately that's meant questioning relationships and the social and cultural norms and plenty of the things that go with them. Which I fear will only further alienate more possible matches.
Actually dating was one of the funnier things I saw. Apparently that's a weak spot. Normally we are come off as very confident and we tend to come off as less confidence while trying to attract a mate but once we stop looking and our confidence goes back to normal we become much more desirable.
My first thought was, "Then I'm doomed on a dating website. How do you appear to not be looking? How to you keep from losing that confidence?" I thought about how long (that's a double-edged sword I am certain) my profile is and that the sheer length may speak to my confidence (if I wasn't I'd have little to say about myself) but how many people will want to wade all the way through it?
I want a companion I can count on for the rest of our days. I'd like to have some similar mindsets about certain things someone who can see the logic (that will be my downfall) in things. I'd really like someone who is open-minded like I am, I've written about that lack of open-mindedness more than once and how it frustrates me. I don't want to have to be frustrated the rest of my life with the person I choose to spend it with.
As I question dating and things related to it I can't help but to think that I will be clashing with the status quo. I don't want to mimic other people my whole life. Especially not with the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. I want to be able to be myself, completely, without having to restrain myself because I think it's how other people act or because if I don't I think other people won't accept me. I don't want to act at home. That's one place there shouldn't be a charade.
I have to be careful to not come off as arrogant. Remember, unabashedly saying you know what you know very confidently can come off as arrogant. (If I really know something I like to know it inside-and-out frontwards-and-backwards.) Or condescending and I know I've been told I've come off that way once or twice. If I'm talking to you and you've made it clear you aren't communicating at my level I'll adjust as needed, sounding condescending isn't intentional it's more like an unintended side-effect. I'm reminded of the following quote concerning software, "It's a feature, not a bug!"
Today I was haunted (not emotionally, more like the question was following me around as if I was being silently stalked by a spectre) by whether I had discovered this back in high school.
I think I did. I don't remember reading anything that stuck with me as much as it did yesterday. It may have been something that was more in passing when I was younger? The letters feel very familiar, as if I had tested and seen those four letters before.
I meant to turn on the desktop computer and see if I had any text files referencing the personality type or with notes about it. That's the kind of thing that would have piqued my interest enough to keep notes on it back then. I know because I did the same thing with horoscope stuff, which admittedly, compared to this is far less interesting.
I couldn't find anything among the text files that I carried over to the laptop about it.
There I've gone again, spending a rather serious amount of time writing. More time, in fact, than I had intended. Again.
I opened this page and then promptly neglected it after writing two entire questions. Wow. Way to be distracted.
I was just looking through some old text files, many of which I haven't finished sorting into a more organized fashion. At best they are currently semi-organized. That's better than just a mess of files in a single folder with names that are, at best, archaic. Plus I've named them something that in most cases has something to do with the content. Unlike certain people who email me with subject lines that have nothing to do with the content of the email. Which makes organizing email utterly useless. This ties into what I was planning to write about tonight. I know the general sentiment is that younger folks tend to not waste time sorting emails. I don't bother with it at work, mostly because I don't have enough time to between calls (there is virtually no time between calls these days anyway) and it's way easier to search the inbox than sorting it into folders I mostly don't use while on the clock.
I found one detailing the "origin" of the name of a, I might say character, but really it was just the handle I went by on that particular MOO (if you aren't that old or geeky think of it was a text-based virtual world/chat but more interactive with virtual objects you could look at/manipulate and rooms you could move between) which I know I made up on the spot when this one total stranger asked me where my name came from.
The original story for that specific name was from a fifty-five word story.
Which I then proceeded to blow into...no less than several paragraphs (I haven't finished reading it yet) of zaniness. This particular story was like a "reboot" of the fifty-five word original micro-short story.
Concocting zany stories on a whim in that MOO (or one of two others I visited at the time, when MOOs were starting to die) was one of the things I thoroughly enjoyed. If I was able to drag in other people that were there and online I did it. I remember using the regulars to create a pantheon of "gods" in jest Grecko-Roman style for no reason other than it amused me.
Or another time I had changed my name and I had described myself as a space cadet. That was another grand adventure that took me to the moon. We saw monsters there!
I need to re-commit and get my website back together with a new look. I need to rock the new supported CSS (Yay for CSS3 support!) so I can share some of this.
I may also want to consider going back and re-writing it (2.0) and making the stories available, maybe as ebooks. I downloaded a program that I could use to make iBooks (as I recall?) to view on iOS devices.
Since last night, since the very tail end of the second entry that I wrote yesterday one thing has predominantly been on my mind.
My Jungian / Myers-Briggs (or Briggs Myers? MBTI) personality type, which apparently is pretty uncommon among the general public. Yay?
It certainly shed light on some things.
Like in part why I find myself absolutely loathing people. General stupidity as I tend to think of it but after further analysis (Yes, I'm a thinker, as if you hadn't noticed by now.) well, really just a bit of additional consideration (like less than a single stride for my mind) I realized it's probably not general stupidity but that I think much faster than most people do and I'm already working out all the angles on something and figuring out the options while other people...are not. They might not even have considered where I'm coming from or what I'm thinking. Which...is frustrating for me.
Last night it was like I could comment on nearly everything I was reading going, "Yes...I can see...", "I remember doing this when I was young, that's true...", "That would be why I do this or that at work, hmm...", "That explains why I have trouble relating to people and tend to come off as cold or unemotional."
I expected to write a very long entry. Another day perhaps but not tonight. (I can't find a comfortable position to use the laptop tonight. I don't exactly want it propped on the recliner but my shorts are too slippery for the laptop to stay where I put it. The Macbook is all, "Whee, it's a slip-and-slide! I want to go to slide to the bottom!"
One of those traits you've probably seen in action is being judgmental. Oh yes. Any kind of decision or opinion arrived at by illogical or irrational means I loathe. Not plain old regular loathing but with an extra helping of loathing with a burning passion.
That's a big part of why I hate people who "like to argue" or who "like to debate" because generally? There comes a point when logic exits the scene. As soon as it leaves the scene I lose all interest. That's when I call it, it's game over.
I've described this before. I think I mentioned it when I first wrote about "troop movements" (look for the oldest entry under that tag) where I will try to have an interesting and engaging discussion that, yes, involves peoples views and opinions and as soon as I see that look in the eye where I know logic was just thrown from a window on the top floor of the highest skyscraper I quit. I recess to the shadows and wait for it to simmer out. I don't manipulate the situation (even though I could and if I had learned how to manipulate effectively) even if it might bring the rationless defenses to an end so that we can talk about something else. I prefer to leave it fizzle out, like a fire without enough fuel or oxygen.
I'm pretty certain I've written about it on at least one other occasion, maybe when I was talking about presenting a different version of myself to different people? Which...is also a personality trait of my type, mimicking other people to try and better fit in and instead of being...That Guy.
Or my hate for blind obedience (oh man, I've known about that one for ages) and my hate for social...how did I see it described the other day? It was talking about dating and hating the social or cultural...games, if you will, that goes with things like dating. OH MY GOSH! I know!
Mind you, I hadn't thought about it as in-depth as suddenly struck me--like a ton of bricks, books, or a tsunami - whichever you prefer; and speaking of tsunamis I don't know if I'd prefer to be all washed up or all washed out.
I thought using a dating website would be practical (that's that efficient and logical personality at work) but noooo! Despite messaging the ladies if I get one response but nothing after that I just stop. I take it they aren't interested and they were responding to be nice. Okay then. If you aren't interested you aren't interested. No point wasting my time in a chase that's not going anywhere. Sorry, I've already done that and what did I get for my time and trouble?
But nooo, apparently feigning disinterest is part of the game. How completely annoying, and useless and inefficient, and illogical, and...allow me to pause my outrage mid-sentence because, yeah, I see where this is going. This is a laundry-list of personality traits that are common to my personality type. Awesome.
I am definitely emotional but I don't make a habit of wearing my emotions on my sleeve. What good does that do me? I may not feel like I have a large emotional range. Have you ever noticed I tend to use the same, maybe six moods over all the years I've been writing in this journal? The repeats: tired, sleep, blah, um...? Those have been like my "go to" moods over the years.
I remember the one roommate I had who said he was really good at reading people but even he found me very difficult to read. Considering who said it I took some pride in being able to even hide from him reading me.
While I can be hard-working and determined it's a matter of having a good reason to do so. Busy-work drives me batty. Busy-work is exactly how I saw most homework assignments. I don't know how I managed to get by in school to be honest, I don't know if it was that I knew I could sit in class and try to focus on whatever the matter-at-hand was and then blow off homework. I had a study hall and sometimes I made a little dent on homework there but never at home. I didn't have a good environment at home for it.
Being locked out of the house until dinner time didn't really help with that. I wasn't going to do it at a friend's house. (Really? That would have felt weird.) After dinner I just didn't have the right home environment for it. My mom constantly argued with my dad, how was I going to get his help with homework? No offense but I wouldn't have wanted my mother's help with any of it. My dad always struck me as the smarter one. I respected my dad...uh-oh, another personality trait for my type. People who are illogical, aren't smart, or made irrational decisions we tend to lose respect for and once gone it's very difficult to earn again.
Which is why today at work I was surprising that I've been doing the same job, one that is not very well suited to my personality type for almost twice as long as the jobs I'd done before it. It's strict, I have no freedom (Hello, please treat me like an adult. I want to go to lunch when I'm...oh, I don't know, hungry!) and it's a very well defined role (boo - conformity), and I don't get to take on fun or interesting challenges that require interesting, original, or creative solutions.
That was something I really enjoyed when they started the internal message board to discuss ideas on how we could improve things. While I might not have been great at always identifying the need I could see weak ideas and could make them better or offer a superior solution. I always thought of it as being a bit like car body work, if you have a hole in the body you would use sheet metal and you could rivet it to the body that remained around the hole, then you could use Bondo to smooth out the difference in height from the sheet metal that you put over the hole and the remaining body. You'd prime it and paint it and be finished. It was like they had done a very rough fix so I'd go in and refine it, touch it up, improving it.
I haven't done that in a while. They changed the system (for the worse - sigh) so that one person proposes an idea, you vote on it, if people like it great. If not it goes nowhere. If you have a better solution or a better way you can try commenting (the comment presentation sucks for encouraging discussion - as in more than a lot, it's more like it's trying to prevent actual discussion; hello inefficiency!) but don't expect anyone to actually read it muchless you your feedback or take it to heart.
I like the company but when they...kept pushing this inferior system as the way to encourage improvements...yeah, I found myself losing interesting in the new mechanism they wanted us to use because it wasn't efficient. It helped them track it through the system but did it help encourage better ideas or help refine ideas that were actually worthy and had sufficient merit to move on? No. Instead it resulted in spam.
Yes. That's right.
A bunch of low quality ideas that are only there because people don't know how or don't care about taking full advantage of the resources that are there to help them provide high quality feedback.
Which reduces the effectiveness and success rate of great ideas getting all the way through the pipeline.
That and that phone reps are suppose to do it "between calls" but my group has been so busy the last year and a half (Nearly two years now - seriously someone (or more than one) is failing at their job and its core responsibilities. If you pick up more clients or more business ensuring you are staffed appropriately is a no-brainer. I thought it was, how is this possibly not common sense? Sigh, typical response. Just because I've thought about it (I think a lot, it's what us intuitive thinker types do) doesn't mean everyone has.) that using the improvement system is impossible.
Questioning everything.
That sounds about right.
Lately that's meant questioning relationships and the social and cultural norms and plenty of the things that go with them. Which I fear will only further alienate more possible matches.
Actually dating was one of the funnier things I saw. Apparently that's a weak spot. Normally we are come off as very confident and we tend to come off as less confidence while trying to attract a mate but once we stop looking and our confidence goes back to normal we become much more desirable.
My first thought was, "Then I'm doomed on a dating website. How do you appear to not be looking? How to you keep from losing that confidence?" I thought about how long (that's a double-edged sword I am certain) my profile is and that the sheer length may speak to my confidence (if I wasn't I'd have little to say about myself) but how many people will want to wade all the way through it?
I want a companion I can count on for the rest of our days. I'd like to have some similar mindsets about certain things someone who can see the logic (that will be my downfall) in things. I'd really like someone who is open-minded like I am, I've written about that lack of open-mindedness more than once and how it frustrates me. I don't want to have to be frustrated the rest of my life with the person I choose to spend it with.
As I question dating and things related to it I can't help but to think that I will be clashing with the status quo. I don't want to mimic other people my whole life. Especially not with the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. I want to be able to be myself, completely, without having to restrain myself because I think it's how other people act or because if I don't I think other people won't accept me. I don't want to act at home. That's one place there shouldn't be a charade.
I have to be careful to not come off as arrogant. Remember, unabashedly saying you know what you know very confidently can come off as arrogant. (If I really know something I like to know it inside-and-out frontwards-and-backwards.) Or condescending and I know I've been told I've come off that way once or twice. If I'm talking to you and you've made it clear you aren't communicating at my level I'll adjust as needed, sounding condescending isn't intentional it's more like an unintended side-effect. I'm reminded of the following quote concerning software, "It's a feature, not a bug!"
Today I was haunted (not emotionally, more like the question was following me around as if I was being silently stalked by a spectre) by whether I had discovered this back in high school.
I think I did. I don't remember reading anything that stuck with me as much as it did yesterday. It may have been something that was more in passing when I was younger? The letters feel very familiar, as if I had tested and seen those four letters before.
I meant to turn on the desktop computer and see if I had any text files referencing the personality type or with notes about it. That's the kind of thing that would have piqued my interest enough to keep notes on it back then. I know because I did the same thing with horoscope stuff, which admittedly, compared to this is far less interesting.
I couldn't find anything among the text files that I carried over to the laptop about it.
There I've gone again, spending a rather serious amount of time writing. More time, in fact, than I had intended. Again.