Dammit man, I'm a lawyer, not a mind reader.

[paleogymnast]

CIVILIAN LIFE:

Q1. Name: Paleogymnast (you can call me Paley)

Q2. How did you find out about Elite of the Fleet? I saw your posting on the kirk_mccoy community, and it intrigued me.

Q3. When did you first become interested in Star Trek? I've been a Trekkie or Trekker or some form or another since the time I was, um, one or two? My parents wouldn't let

Comments

Re: Tactical

[paleogymnast]

Hi, and thank you very much for reading my long and at times rambling application. Please bear with me through this long and somewhat rambling comment.

I am not convinced I belong in Tactical, and I really hope it didn't sound that way. Ok, let me add a little to that for the purposes of full disclosure. I tend to be very hyper-aware of my personality, personality type, and what that means for how I interact with others; before I was I used to have a rather miserably frustrated time interacting with others because my personality type is relatively rare and my unique spin on it even rarer and, therefore, before I developed more self-awareness I often found it challenging to relate to others. Based on that, my gut instinct before answering the questionnaire was that I thought I might do well in tactical. But then again when I finished the questionnaire, I actually thought my answers might make me look better-suited towards the exploratory sciences or possibly medical, both of which I am sure I would also enjoy (and if I wind up in medical I realize that will mean working hard on my bedside manner) or maybe even Operations, because I do like planning and schedulingin a way that might fit in well in Operations.

But then again, I have no idea what criteria the Fleet uses to evaluate candidates, so I was incredibly curious as to how the results would come out. So, I tried to answer all of the questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible both because that is what the instructions asked us to do and because I recognize that what one sees in oneself is not always an accurate picture-otherwise this community wouldn't go through the effort of asking everyone to answer a questionnaire and everyone could sort themeslves into whatever track they liked and this would be an entirely different type of community and probably not nearly as much fun).

Immediately after I posted my initial application, I went back and looked at some other posts and worried that I might have been too brief on the five strengths and five weaknesses area--for some reason I had assumed the community was looking for one-word answers on that part (and distilling anything, let alone myself, down to one-word answers is a bit of a challenge for me), but then I saw others had gone at greater length and I worried I might not have been thorough enough. *sigh* Meet my insecurity rearing its ugly head. But I submitted what I submitted. I also agonized over whether or not I should reply to the first comment. What I wanted to do was express my excitement that maybe my self-assessment wasn't that far off, but worried it would wind up sounding like I'd tried to engineer my answers towards a particular track. But, the comment was my honest reaction (I'd been impatiently curious to see what comments would be), so I figured I might as well post it-it adds to the picture of what I'm like.

I can be agressive, competitive, and at times confrontational, but I don't enjoy public displays of emotion, so I usually try to keep a lid on that until I'm in private or with trusted friends, and instead prefer to pursuade others to see my point of view. After all, many people (myself included) don't respond well to displays of ego or brash or grating orders; if you explain and convince you'll usually get a much better response.

I think it is interesting that you mention Picard and reboot!Kirk, because between the two of them, I definitely identify more with Picard (although I can definitely see myself in reboot!Kirk's temper/frustration when he got thrown off the bridge and then, off the ship... I just try not to react that way in public). I always try to follow the rules; I'm only likely to break or bend a rule if following it makes no sense and would do more harm than good-and even then I would much rather find a loophole within the system than outright cross a line (think Picard negotiating with the Sheliac in "The Ensigns of Command"). My loyalty is to principles more than rules, which can sometimes be arbitrary or reflect awkward compromises, but I won't go out of my way to break rules just to get what I want.

Thank you again for reading and voting/commenting on my application.