Meta-blogging moment: I started the two themes of this blog almost two years ago, "Pique" which is basically any post where I rant about something, and "Reverie" which is any post where I do dream self-analysis, since I'm a vivid dreamer. The latter are probably rarely of interest to anyone aside from myself, but I am mostly blogging as a form of self-expression, anyways. Heck, both Pique and Reverie posts are forms of navel-gazing. This is the first post that has both joined together.

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Pique: I had a very difficult emotional day yesterday. There are several historical reasons why 11/1 is always a challenging day. It's the day my parents were married, and the day, 23 years later, that they separated. My Granny and a family dog both died on 10/31. I think these sorts of events have resonance across years.

But aside from historical reasons, three things occurred yesterday for me that have put me in a heightened emotional state, and which triggered a vivid dream.

1) I received in the mail some photographs taken by an old boyfriend (I refer to him as "the former love of my life") from when we were dating almost 15 years ago. He sent a lovely note with them about how the best ones capture my personality and my beauty. I looked at them yesterday morning, and they made me weep. I was so young and naive and unaware. And so thin and, yes, beautiful, but in a strange raw way I can't put my finger on. But what was most sad was how in love with him I was, and how I will never love anyone like that again. Not that I won't love someone, but it won't have that same innocence, that same openness. I'm amazed how he managed to capture all of that on film - the photos were excellent. I felt like he gave me back a piece of my soul.

"One day you're there, and then all of a sudden there's less of you, and you wonder where that part went, if it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking, maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize, it's just gone." - Peggy Olson, Mad Men

Maybe it finally came back.


2) I have finally decided, after agonizing over it and after discussing it with Mom, to put down my cat Chester. This decision isn't going to be popular with most people I know. Chester is 17 years old and she has renal failure, although I need to get the blood work done to prove this. She drinks huge volumes of water and urinates the same. She has destroyed the hardwood floors in my kitchen over the past two years and made my house reek of cat pee. I have tried everything I can think of to minimize the damage, including spending a lot on puppy pads which I lay down in her favorite peeing areas, but she scratches at them which means they don't cover the area any more and she pees under them. I currently have her gated into the laundry room where she is rapidly destroying the floors in there, and the linoleum is warping, but at least it's not hardwood. She has no life in there, and stays in her kitty bed most of the time. I try to make time to visit with her every day, but she cries now and then out of loneliness. She is also starting to vomit more, not due to hairballs, which could indicate that she's close to total renal failure.

My cats are like my children, and this is an incredibly painful thing to be doing, but I just can't handle this any more. Mom helped me with this and has been very supportive, pointing out that our pets trust us to take care of them during life and also in deciding when it's time for them to die. Very few house cats die natural deaths in their sleep.

Mom also pointed out that, now that I have decided this is what needs to happen, I should take a good friend with me when I have her put down. Someone who can be supportive of my decision and is willing to drive me home since I probably won't be able to handle that myself. I'm going to be a wreck. But -- please forgive me, those friends of mine who read this blog -- I can't think of anyone. I know that I have friends who would be willing to help me, but I can't think of anyone that I would be comfortable trusting with what will likely be me in hysterics. I guess I have problems A) asking for help and B) allowing anyone to see me like that. This should be one of those things where someone immediately leaps into your mind - your best friend, your boyfriend, your husband, something. I don't have those things. I have very old friends like tmc, who I'm sure would be willing to go, but I feel like he has enough stuff going on in his own life to deal with my crap, too. Plus, he doesn't drive. ;)

The fact that I don't have that sort of automatically qualifying relationship is my fault. I have only myself to blame for my inability to open up.


3) I was stood up by my date last night. This is just a final nail in the coffin for this situation, but it still hurt.


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Reverie: I am in the top floor room of a brownstone in New York City, and Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character from Sex and the City, is there. She's actually the character, not Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress. Carrie is going through her results of a personality test. She's telling me that she took the test at an official testing site of some sort, and it's the MBTI (of which I am so fond). Except it's not, because there are the usual I/E, J/P, T/F variables, but the N/S variable is replaced with Q/something. Carrie has scored a Q in this area, and we're trying to figure out what it means. Then our discussion becomes a montage, as though it were part of a SatC episode, and in particular, I am Miranda. We're discussing what it means to be an F, and how we think Samantha is a T, and we're laughing and sharing our insights with each other.

Suddenly we cut to a scene where I am in bed with Steve, Miranda's husband from the show, and we're cuddling and talking about my conversation with Carrie, and how I felt really close to her. Steve is appreciating the story and seems very happy for me that I had a good time with my best friend.

The end.

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Analysis: I think that this is almost certainly complete wish fulfillment, especially with what went on earlier in the day.

I'm usually not a huge fan of the Enneagram - I think it's too simplistic. Not that I don't like to reduce people to simple types a la the MBTI, but Enneagram seemed to not really ever quite "get" me. But I thought I'd post this little blogthing from Ok Cupid:

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The second Robert Redford film that I watched over the past three-day weekend was Out of Africa with Meryl Streep. This has always been a favorite film of mine, and like The Sting, I get more out of it each time I watch it.

This time, I took a Myers-Briggs approach to the film. Streep plays Karen Blixen (the pseudonym for Isak Dinesen, who wrote the book the film was based on), and Redford plays Denys Finch Hatton. These two charaters ave very different personalities, and the conflicts and cohesion between them are the main theme throughout the movie.

It seems to me that Karen is an INFJ - she excels at story-writing, which is one of the strong suits of an INFJ in many analyses. She's definitely got a J streak, in that she likes order and stability, and for things to be finalized. Denys, on the other hand, is either an ISTP or an ESTP - probably an I, since he's a bit of a loner. He's someone who likes to live in the moment, using his senses, and with complete freedom. He seems to have a ready mastery of machinery (e.g., the airplane) and thrives in the safari existence where he relies on his senses to hunt.

Karen seems drawn to Denys due to his adventurous, untameable nature, which is something she's not used to. And yet she still does want to tame him - or, perhaps, for him to willingly tame himself. Denys makes it clear that he is not someone who wants to give up his freedom, and doesn't want to ever settle down and be married. As he says in the film:

Denys: I won't be closer to you, and I won't love you more because of a piece of paper.

Denys seems to find Karen's stable life, with a house and a farm and good china and furnishings, comforting. He eventually moves in with Karen, although he regards it as a home base and spends most of his time out in the wild, with no time table or expectations of when he will be home and when he will be gone.

Karen handles this for a while, but eventually it begins to rankle. She becomes jealous of what she sees as his ability to potentially be with other women while still maintaining their relationship. Eventually, they fight over this and she breaks the relationship off. They separate for a while, and then due to circumstances beyond her control, Karen is forced to sell her farm and move back to Denmark. Just as she is about to finish her transactions and move back home, Denys re-appears in her life and seems to want to commit to her. He says, in regards to being alone:

Denys: You've ruined it for me, you know?

By becoming involved with someone vastly different from themselves, both characters have changed. Karen has affected Denys in his thoughts of whether he wants his freedom, and has shown him the value of stability. Denys has taught Karen about the freedom of living in the moment and the joys of using one's senses to guide one's way through life.

This isn't a typical Hollywood film, which is one of the reasons I love it, but I won't spoil the ending. The main perspective that I gained this time was how the personality differences between the two characters could be such a draw and simultaneously so difficult to work with. Any long-term commitment between the two would take a lot of effort, and a lot of compromise, I would imagine. I attribute this to the vast differences in Myers-Briggs types, although I'm not sure that any relationship is exactly easy.

Both Redford and Streep give stellar performances in this film. The excellent writing helps these actors to shine, and the beautiful scenes of Africa are a real treat.

I just finished Harry Potter #7. It's been 23 hours and 45 minutes since I started.

This experience has been my first (at least partially) measured experiment where I was trying to figure out exactly how slow of a reader I am.

I got the book at almost the same time as my friend hsarik - she started reading about 5 minutes after I did. She finished in almost exactly 7 hours, which is a pretty rapid clip for a 759 page book. That breaks down to 108 pages/hour, and that includes bathroom and food breaks and such.

When I read, I don't tend to focus all that well, because random sentences or ideas that hit me while reading will lead me to spin off into potentially unrelated thought processes as I'm reading. I enjoy these mental excursions, so I never have trained myself to curtail them. I think it's part of being a Myers-Briggs N. Also, as I'm reading, I'm definitely critiquing the plot, the characterization, and general writing style of the book. Thirdly, I'm trying to predict where things are going to go, and more importantly, where I think they should or ought to be going, and if the plot has veered from what I think it should be doing. There's the J. :) And the N a bit too, as it helps me to see the overall patterns of the novel.

[Ok, I'm way too in love with the Myers-Briggs. I know this. I'll get over it someday. Maybe.]

I was going along at a pretty good clip (for me) at 50 pages per hour for the first 6 hours. I figured it would take me a little over 15 hours to finish reading. So I was already feeling a bit lame for being slow. But then I hit a really boring patch in the book and slowed down to a dismal 25 pages/hour for the next 2.5 hours. (I can hardly even believe that!) My interest in the book and the plot at that point was clearly waning, and I think it in addition set all these tertiary mental processes spinning, and plus, I was getting tired of sitting there and reading.

I stopped keeping as good track of what my rate was from there on out, although the book did pick up a bit. I stopped reading at about 12:30 am, and went to bed, thinking I'd pick up in the morning. But then my pager went off at 2:00 am and woke me up, so I stayed up and read until about 5:30. Then I woke up around 8:30 and had it finished by 10:30. It made for a weird, half-too-tired-to-focus reading experience, but in some ways that fit the plot line nicely.

So I figure I spent a total of 17 hours reading, which makes for an overall rate of about 45 pages/hour. It looks like most of the information I can find online about reading rates is in words per minute - perhaps I will look at trying to figure out that rate at some point.

What I know that I do that slows me down so much aside from my internal dialog is, at least from this Wikipedia article, a hell of a lot of subvocalization, and pretty much no chunking. A friend of mine in high school was dumbfounded to discover that I actually read every single word. She tried to teach me some chunking techniques, but I was pretty resistant.

I was actually a very advanced reader in my youth - I started reading at age three. Then we started moving around a lot, and whereas I still performed well above my grade level, I missed a lot of stuff (like sentence diagramming, learning cursive which I eventually taught myself, and who knows what reading techniques.) As I got older I displayed more aptitude for math and science than for English and history, although my French and Greek skills were good. I guess no one ever thought to teach me how to read quickly for content, and then I was past the point of changing.

I think there are times when my reading rate hampers me, and it's one of the only measurable things I can point to that makes me feel a bit stupid. Otherwise I tend to test on very high levels on other things. I guess we all have our limitations and specialties.

Oh, and the Harry Potter book was good. :) It could have used maybe 100 pages taken out during the boring section, but otherwise, I'm quite pleased with it.

Now I suppose I had better get on the stick with that Perl code...

I'm recording some things off of my DV-R that have been sitting there for months, which includes two Charlie Brown specials: It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Since I'm already on a Myers-Briggs kick today, I started trying to type the characters. Here's what I came up with:

Linus - INFJ. Anyone who can believe in The Great Pumpkin has got to be an NF Idealist. E/I is harder with him, but he seems not to initiate interactions with others aside from Charlie Brown. He is instead reactive and reserved. His tendency to be a bit of a counselor for Charlie Brown makes me think he's more of a J than a P.

Charlie Brown - INTJ. This one's a bit tricky. He's an I, clearly. His interactions (or lack thereof) with the little red-headed girl are a good example of this. I think he's an NT Rational, as he spends so much time thinking and fretting over things internally, which would make him an N. The T is iffy - I chose T because emotions seem to confuse him, whereas when he's in charge of something that's thought-oriented he seems to be more of a duck in water. I'm trying to come up with a good example to back this up. I chose J for him because he seems to have trouble with change, and is much more comfortable when things are stable.

Ok, I found something in A Charlie Brown Christmas that backs up my NT vs. NF argument:

CB: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus.  Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy.  I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.    I just don't understand Christmas, I guess.  I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy.  I always end up feeling depressed.

Linus:  Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.

In this exchange, Charlie Brown is trying to "understand Christmas", and he's trying to figure out his emotions from an intellectual standpoint - like it's a problem to be solved with thought.   So I stand by the NT choice.

Lucy - ESTJ. A general if I ever saw one. She doesn't have much interest in recognizing other people's emotions - she's there to make sure the line is toed. And she'll be loud about it. And effective. Because she has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 very good reasons why you better.  She does show another side of herself (sort of) with the whole Psychiatric Help 5¢ bit, but clearly she's very ineffectual in that role and is only doing it to make money and feel self-important. This is not a general knock on ESTJs so much as Lucy in particular. My grandfather is an ESTJ (see Orson Welles in The Long Hot Summer - that's Grandpa) and whereas he is very definitely the one in charge, he has always done a very good job at guarding his family and making sure everyone was taken care of, even if it was tough love at times. I have a lot of respect for him.

Snoopy - ESFP. He's definitely an adventurer and a thrill-seeker (Here's the World War I Flying Ace in his Sopwith Camel), which would make him an SP, and is also suave and outgoing, which would make him an E. He also reacts emotionally very easily (e.g., weeping while Schroeder plays piano), and is a bit of a performer with his Flying Ace story lines, playing Joe Cool, a vulture, etc.

Sally - ESFJ. Sally is definitely comfortable initiating interactions and showing affection, particularly with Linus, so that makes her an E, and also an F, since she seems emotionally-driven. She's more of an SJ Guardian than an SP Artisan, in my point of view, since she doesn't seem to have any particular artistic bent. She seems to be conscious of the material world and her immediate surroundings rather than living in her head like Charlie Brown and Linus do, which would lean more toward SJ than NF. For an example of her judging side, just watch what happens if someone cheats her out of tricks-or-treats. Blockhead! ;)

Schoroeder - ISFP? ESFP? He's clearly an artist, but he's not outgoing, so I'll go with ISFP.

There's not enough data on the other characters for me to make any sort of assessment.

I found this exercise fun - any thoughts or feedback? Should Charlie Brown be an INFP?

I was inspired by my friend Heather to re-take this blogthing which has been improved since the last time I took it. It's interesting to see how people might view me in a negative way - I can think of a couple of people who would definitely see me as unstable and weak. On the other hand, I don't think of them so highly either. ;)

You Are An INFJ

The Protector You live your life with integrity, originality, vision, and creativity. Independent and stubborn, you rarely stray from your vision - no matter what it is. You are an excellent listener, with almost infinite patience. You have complex, deep feelings, and you take great care to express them. In love, you truly see relationships as an opportunity to connect and grow. You enjoy relationships as long as they are improving and changing. You can't stand stagnation. At work, you stay motivated and happy... as long as you are working toward a dream you support. You would make a great photographer, alternative medicine guru, or teacher. How you see yourself: Hardworking, ethical, and helpful When other people don't get you, they see you as: Manipulative, weak, and unstable

You Are An INFJ

The Protector You live your life with integrity, originality, vision, and creativity. Independent and stubborn, you rarely stray from your vision - no matter what it is. You are an excellent listener, with almost infinite patience. You have complex, deep feelings, and you take great care to express them. You would make a great photographer, alternative medicine guru, or teacher.

I don't think I'm actually that good a listener. I think a lot of the time I end up doing more listening than talking with my close friends, but I'm not a good interviewer. I know this because my Mom is awesome at both listening and asking question to get one to open up further, and it's a skill I don't possess. But I am able to be very empathetic and a caring listener - that is, unless I'm feeling stressed, in which case I shut down. But that is in itself indicative of being an INFJ.

Anyways, for what it's worth, and as a somewhat quick-and-dirty Myers-Briggs test, this ain't bad.

This one's even more interesting:

Jung Explorer Test
Actualized type: INFJ
(who you are)

INFJ - "Author". Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population.

Preferred type: ENFJ
(who you prefer to be)

ENFJ - "Persuader". Outstanding leader of groups. Can be aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be. 2.5% of total population.

Attraction type: ENFP

(who you are attracted to)

ENFP - "Journalist". Uncanny sense of the motivations of others. Life is an exciting drama. 8.1% of total population.

Take Jung Explorer Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


I would certainly like to be a lot more extroverted than I actually am, and sometimes I can fake it pretty well. Depends on the crowd. I'm also definitely attracted to people who are extroverts. Interesting.

I first saw the movie Harold and Maude when I was in high school, and loved it instantly. I rewatch it every few years, and I always get something new out of it as my perspective changes. Harold looks so young to me now. And Maude's vibrancy is truly remarkable the more I understand about aging, and about life.

In watching it this time, I did a Myers-Briggs typing of the two characters. I think Maude is an ENFP - The Champion. I'm not as sure about Harold, but he seems to be an INTP. Although I think Maude helps him to start letting his F side out a bit.

But what really got me this time was the following bit, which is always moving, but more especially as I have gotten older and closed myself off more, emotionally, than I did when I was younger:

"A lot of people enjoy being dead, but they're not dead, really. They're just backing away from life. Reach out, take a chance, get hurt even. Play as well as you can. Go team, go! Gimme an L, gimme an I, gimme a V, gimme an E... L - I - V - E, LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room."
- Maude

I hope I can embrace that idea a little more fully, embrace life more fully than I have done in some ways up until now. I don't want fear to win.

Another all-time favorite quote:

"Everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can't let the world judge you too much."
- Maude

So, I'm a great big fan of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, along with the Kiersey Temperament Sorter. I realize that people don't fit neatly into sixteen types, but it frequently helps me understand someone that is very different from me, and to accept my own strengths and weaknesses. I find it especially helpful in the workplace, but also in relationships and friendships. (Here's a free MBTI quiz if you're interested.)

I am an INFJ, although my J and my I are not very strong. The easiest way to see that I'm an I is to bring me into a room full of people that I don't know and to watch me clam up. There's a phrase that I really like that can help you determine whether someone is an E or an I: Extroverts talk to think, and Introverts think to talk. It's not always accurate, but it's a good rule of thumb.

The J versus P thing is tricky with me. I am really a pretty big slob a lot of the time, but I'm not really happy with that - I'm much happier when things are orderly. I am usually on time if not early, I like to conform to normal work hours for the most part, and I function really well when I have some usual scheduled habits. I just don't always stick to them. And I really feel much better when things are decided, resolved, and stable than when they are open-ended, changing and flexible. So I'm a J.

My favorite description of my type / temperament calls me "The Mystic", but I've also heard INFJ's called "The Protector," "The Mystic Writer," and "The Counselor." I do feel an urge to write that I don't channel very well a lot of the time, but in some ways I think "The Counselor" helps describe what I do most often in my life. Even at work, I feel rather like Deanna Troi on the Enterprise. It's hard to describe what I do, aside from giving some sense of community to whatever team I'm on.

Of course it's never a good idea to figure out someone else's type, because only they can truly answer the questions for themselves. On the other hand, it's not too hard to fake out the test if you're not able to have clarity about yourself. So I go ahead and "type" other people, with the grain of salt included that I may not have any real idea of what goes on in their heads.

That said, I find it interesting that:

My Mother is (see disclaimer above) an ESFJ and my father an ISTP. That's actually a pretty good match, as Guardians like my mother tend to work well with Artisans like my father. I think that dad's second wife is also an ESFJ, so that trend seems to work for him. Mom remarried with an ISFJ, which seems to work very well. (Which is contrary to what the pairings seem to indicate will work, so that just goes to show how this is not really a science at all. Or that I just don't understand it well enough.)

Can you imagine two Sensing parents with a highly iNtuitive daughter? I'm pretty sure they didn't know what to do with me. Also, given my father's highly athletic / crafty sensing bent, he just couldn't really fathom someone who spent so much time in her own head and without very much awareness of her physical surroundings. He found it quite frustrating to teach me how to roller skate, bike, drive, whatever. On the other hand, I learned from him how to set up a stereo or a computer, which was much more interesting to me, since the end result was music or programming or playing adventure games. More to the point, now that I understand more about how he deals with the world, I can see how completely different we are, and it helps me to understand why he didn't really get me at all. And that that's really okay.

Also, my mother was (and is) the consummate "Good Boss" - in fact, my current boss is the same type (although perhaps Heather is an N), and so that makes me very comfortable in my current working situation. Mom didn't necessarily empathize with my viewpoint on life, but she did recognize my strengths and encourage them. She has the innate ability to lead a team and to value her team members. And although we did bang heads quite a bit during my rebellious teen years, we have a very close relationship now.

I've typed (to myself) just about everyone I know, and the more I do so, the better I understand others - as long as I realize that I could be surprised or mistaken. But I think these tools give me a lot more understanding, or at least change my focus to wondering what makes others tick rather than wondering why they don't interact with me the way I want them to... it helps me be less self-centered or self-involved.