Do you think that I write this blog for myself? You couldn't be more wrong, reader. I write this for you. And it is for you that I have come back early from my blogging sabbatical to share with you an important public service announcement.
Oh, you didn't know I was on sabbatical? You thought I was being noncommittal, uncreative, lazy and a blogging equivalent of a tease? Well shame on you for thinking those things.
ANYWAY I am trying to tell you something important here.
Some time ago I shared with you all my serious concerns about flesh-eating bacteria, the likelihood that you will catch them from a toilet seat, and the general horror destined to ensue. Well, I have learned a lot since then and it is time to start Raising Awareness. I can tell you all are with me on this because of all the comments I sense you meant to leave on that post.
My friend's husband (who is a med student) says there is ONE WAY to contract a flesh-eating bacteria and that is through an open wound. So as for catching them from a toilet seat, I guess, you know, check yourself.
It is a real thing, however, that you can be an ordinary graduate student having fun at the lake and get into a zip-line accident leaving you with a massive gash in your leg and a REAL flesh-eating bacteria infection and a one-in-four chance of survival. In Georgia.
People, do not Google that story. I read it so you don't have to. Anyway that is everything you need to know, and the moral of the story is this: the world is scary as shit and you will die from it and so will all your friends.
I have been told there are people who don't think about these things - can you believe that? No, you can't.
That would mean thinking that living into the future isn't like sailing off the edge of the earth. That would mean no one would come if I invited you all to my place for some vodka or whiskey or some other drink with a name that implies you are serious about it, so we could toast one another saying, "It's okay if I die, you don't have to watch."
But I know you would come. Some of you would definitely come. At least one of you would come if I asked VERY nicely and promised hors d'oeuvres. We could play party games? I don't know, I'm not good at parties. But there would be absolutely no flesh-eating bacteria and you could sleep on the couch or the air mattress if you needed to.
What I'm saying is that being as happy and comfortable as possible for as much of the time as is possible is serious work, and I support you in it. And I know at least some of you know what I mean, about permission to refuse or retreat from despair, about not having to watch.
So *hugs* and take care and don't forget your Purell.
But if you catch something horrible from exposing your open wound to a toilet seat? Dude. I told you.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Love and Deconstruction
Don't you ever look at me and think, who are you? I think that sometimes, when I look at you.
It wasn't so much a fight as just a very painful conversation, one of those times when you both squint at each other's eyes and take turns saying, "I don't know what you're talking about." The moodiness of failure was settling in when I realized, like shaking the hair out of my eyes (and feeling stupid for having ever forgotten it for a minute), that this hopeless confusion was not the result of the matter but was the matter.
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,That is not what I meant, at all."
- from TS Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Words are my life, and people like me are their life, too, so I am unafraid to speak plainly about them. They are pitiful, sad, nearly useless things. I love them and revile them because I know what they are. By catching hold of us at such an early age, they trick us into trusting them. Insidious things. We get comfortable with them, so that we never question even that which was never true - that they communicate, that we communicate through them, that if we only master them, we can connect.
A word is not a thing, but only a tenuous relationship between other non-things. The letters on the page, the sound of the word in your ear, these are the signifiers. But what is signified? How do you know a word's meaning except by other words? And so words are signs that point on toward other signs that point on and on toward something we think of as "meaning" but which can never know.
It's a hopeless endeavor when we set out to understand through words. Things like God, the meaning of one's life, the overwhelming questions, seem sometimes to be just ahead of us, on the tips of our tongues, but the more we try to call them out, the further they elude. Words settle in their wake like dust, and they are dust. Not even the Bible will lead you to arrive at God. The words can settle all around you, you can run your fingers through them, but they can never take you past themselves, to what is real.
You are real. Your realness is what makes you unknowable. You are an incomprehensible signified. Your signifiers will bring no one to you.
I cannot trust in words to explain me and teach me. I cannot call on words to bridge us together, two incomprehensible signifieds. When you hold out your hands to receive something real, all I can give you, all anyone can give you, is a few shimmering words.
Words are no more than bird songs. I do not strain to know the meaning of a bird song any more than a bird strains to define its birdness by singing. Singing is for honoring one's soul, not for arguing one's thesis. I hope I can remember that my words are songs. All our words are songs. In the absence of the real, you can still have a few shimmering songs.
I sit on the edge, kicking my feet in the water, calling out my words, hoping to catch some of yours. And if I do, I'll turn them over in my hands and memorize the feel of them, and sing them back to myself again and again. I will sense something, and perhaps it will be close to what you sensed. It will be impossible to understand, but it's okay, because the beauty isn't in understanding. The beauty is in striving.
You are real. Your realness is what makes you unknowable. You are an incomprehensible signified. Your signifiers will bring no one to you.
I cannot trust in words to explain me and teach me. I cannot call on words to bridge us together, two incomprehensible signifieds. When you hold out your hands to receive something real, all I can give you, all anyone can give you, is a few shimmering words.
Words are no more than bird songs. I do not strain to know the meaning of a bird song any more than a bird strains to define its birdness by singing. Singing is for honoring one's soul, not for arguing one's thesis. I hope I can remember that my words are songs. All our words are songs. In the absence of the real, you can still have a few shimmering songs.
I sit on the edge, kicking my feet in the water, calling out my words, hoping to catch some of yours. And if I do, I'll turn them over in my hands and memorize the feel of them, and sing them back to myself again and again. I will sense something, and perhaps it will be close to what you sensed. It will be impossible to understand, but it's okay, because the beauty isn't in understanding. The beauty is in striving.
My love, I cannot tell you what I mean, but perhaps it will mean something to you if I say my soul is a spinning coin. Perhaps you will sense something if I say you are a prism throwing colors on my face.
I am blessed
Just to be, more or less,
Standing in the afterglow of rapture
With the words the rapture left.
I am blessed
Just to be, more or less,
Standing in the afterglow of rapture
With the words the rapture left.
- from Emmy the Great's Paper Forest (Afterglow of Rapture)
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Nonprofit Girl Shares the Elevator
Adventures of Nonprofit Girl, Episode 3
(Did you miss Episodes 1 and 2? They're here.)
The sun is just beginning its descent and the last of her colleagues have just left the office as Nonprofit Girleats the last doughnut straightens up the kitchen and packs up her things. She heads down the hall and a young man from one of the other offices on her floor holds the elevator for her.
Nonprofit Girl knows you are opening yourself up to danger if you smile at people you don't know. A smile, after all, is all it takes to expose any harmless-looking passerby as that infamous imposter, Creepy Stranger Dude. But it was very nice of this stranger to wait and hold the door for her, and she is a superhero after all, so she decides to risk it.
Nonprofit Girl smiles at the stranger, in the face no less, and offers a clear-voiced "thank you."
But Nonprofit Girl is about to encounter something she never could have predicted.
The elevator door closes. The man (Nonprofit Girl is seriously not making this up) the man paces the elevator like a caged lion. It's only five floors, but he paces that four feet of space like death is closing in, and in doing so, chokes on his coffee. He is still sputtering when the door opens to the lobby. Nonprofit Girl considers asking him if he's okay but realizes the answer to that question would take far too long to answer.
She dashes out, thinking, Damn.
(Did you miss Episodes 1 and 2? They're here.)
The sun is just beginning its descent and the last of her colleagues have just left the office as Nonprofit Girl
Nonprofit Girl knows you are opening yourself up to danger if you smile at people you don't know. A smile, after all, is all it takes to expose any harmless-looking passerby as that infamous imposter, Creepy Stranger Dude. But it was very nice of this stranger to wait and hold the door for her, and she is a superhero after all, so she decides to risk it.
Nonprofit Girl smiles at the stranger, in the face no less, and offers a clear-voiced "thank you."
But Nonprofit Girl is about to encounter something she never could have predicted.
The elevator door closes. The man (Nonprofit Girl is seriously not making this up) the man paces the elevator like a caged lion. It's only five floors, but he paces that four feet of space like death is closing in, and in doing so, chokes on his coffee. He is still sputtering when the door opens to the lobby. Nonprofit Girl considers asking him if he's okay but realizes the answer to that question would take far too long to answer.
She dashes out, thinking, Damn.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Let us go then
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
-from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been a kind of extended mantra for me. You could say it's a poem of an introvert's despair, but I don't find it depressing, I find it comforting. Stanzas play in my head like a favorite song. So I was thrilled this weekend when I picked up a copy of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking and found references to Prufrock and other Eliot poems right there in the introduction! It's going to be a good read.
Today a colleague and I were sharing a laugh about my jumpiness, which even I will not deny must be hilarious to observers, and I thought to myself, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous. But the stanza stuck in my mind. No! I am not Prince Hamlet.
I looked at the poem. Politic, cautious, and meticulous. That's me, and that's my tragedy, boring, perfectionistic, critical, unambitious by general consensus, and yet you could not teach me to hate the politic, cautious and meticulous in me any more than you could teach me to despise my bones.
It's all right, Prufrock gets it. Eliot was the same as me, and he gave me Prufrock who can shrug at me and say, "Let us go then." I can read the poem and feel like less of a ghost.
But today something about this stanza shook me up in a way it never has before. Because before I had Prufrock, when I was 17 and Eliot still read like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, before I had Prufrock I had Hamlet.
Can anyone deny Hamlet is the Great Introvert of Literature? His great frustration is an inability to translate his thoughts into an outward manifestation. It's not only an inability to act (though that is a part of it, for him and Eliot and perhaps all introverts). It's an inability to bring other people close to understanding the things that he is close to understanding. It's an inability to deny the truth, that fully understanding is impossible. It's an inescapable grief over the observation that the people around him do not seem to wrestle so fiercely and endlessly with the complexities of right and wrong, life and death, love and hate, beauty and corruption.
Hamlet never really avenges his father. In the end, he is caught up in a final scene of outrageous coincidences, which turn like the cogs of destiny to kill everyone who ever mattered at Elsinore.
Prince Hamlet: he grieved, and died.
It isn't such a remarkable story when you boil it down. A traumatized teen, depressed, with no one to turn to. He was brilliant, though, and he lets us say, when introverts despair, our minds are as wide as our grief is, our hearts are as deep.
Why, then, should Prufrock declare, with such pitiable defeat, No! I am not Prince Hamlet?
In other words, what does it mean for us introverts when we cannot even be Hamlet? He grieved and died. But he was wide-minded, deep-hearted. Can't we, at the end, have that much?
I think we can. I say you can have that much. I would tell Prufrock that he is wrong, that he is Prince Hamlet, and so am I. And I would read him the words of Hamlet, which mirror his own. I would show him how Hamlet counts himself inferior, and calls himself names, and continually fails to figure out and explain what it all means.
... What would he (a talented actor) do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villian, breaks my pate across...
... Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter.
-Hamlet, II.ii.560-578
They are the same soliloquy, the same thoughts. It's likely Eliot meant it that way. I hope so. I hope Eliot could realize that to call himself incomparable to Hamlet was only self-abuse. I hope he could say, "I think I am Prince Hamlet, I think I can grant myself that much."
Hamlet had Horatio, one true friend to whom he could say, dying, "Tell my story." But even Prufrock has someone - has me - to whom he can say, "Let us go then, you and I."
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
-from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been a kind of extended mantra for me. You could say it's a poem of an introvert's despair, but I don't find it depressing, I find it comforting. Stanzas play in my head like a favorite song. So I was thrilled this weekend when I picked up a copy of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking and found references to Prufrock and other Eliot poems right there in the introduction! It's going to be a good read.
Today a colleague and I were sharing a laugh about my jumpiness, which even I will not deny must be hilarious to observers, and I thought to myself, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous. But the stanza stuck in my mind. No! I am not Prince Hamlet.
I looked at the poem. Politic, cautious, and meticulous. That's me, and that's my tragedy, boring, perfectionistic, critical, unambitious by general consensus, and yet you could not teach me to hate the politic, cautious and meticulous in me any more than you could teach me to despise my bones.
It's all right, Prufrock gets it. Eliot was the same as me, and he gave me Prufrock who can shrug at me and say, "Let us go then." I can read the poem and feel like less of a ghost.
But today something about this stanza shook me up in a way it never has before. Because before I had Prufrock, when I was 17 and Eliot still read like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, before I had Prufrock I had Hamlet.
Can anyone deny Hamlet is the Great Introvert of Literature? His great frustration is an inability to translate his thoughts into an outward manifestation. It's not only an inability to act (though that is a part of it, for him and Eliot and perhaps all introverts). It's an inability to bring other people close to understanding the things that he is close to understanding. It's an inability to deny the truth, that fully understanding is impossible. It's an inescapable grief over the observation that the people around him do not seem to wrestle so fiercely and endlessly with the complexities of right and wrong, life and death, love and hate, beauty and corruption.
Hamlet never really avenges his father. In the end, he is caught up in a final scene of outrageous coincidences, which turn like the cogs of destiny to kill everyone who ever mattered at Elsinore.
Prince Hamlet: he grieved, and died.
It isn't such a remarkable story when you boil it down. A traumatized teen, depressed, with no one to turn to. He was brilliant, though, and he lets us say, when introverts despair, our minds are as wide as our grief is, our hearts are as deep.
Why, then, should Prufrock declare, with such pitiable defeat, No! I am not Prince Hamlet?
In other words, what does it mean for us introverts when we cannot even be Hamlet? He grieved and died. But he was wide-minded, deep-hearted. Can't we, at the end, have that much?
I think we can. I say you can have that much. I would tell Prufrock that he is wrong, that he is Prince Hamlet, and so am I. And I would read him the words of Hamlet, which mirror his own. I would show him how Hamlet counts himself inferior, and calls himself names, and continually fails to figure out and explain what it all means.
... What would he (a talented actor) do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villian, breaks my pate across...
... Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter.
-Hamlet, II.ii.560-578
They are the same soliloquy, the same thoughts. It's likely Eliot meant it that way. I hope so. I hope Eliot could realize that to call himself incomparable to Hamlet was only self-abuse. I hope he could say, "I think I am Prince Hamlet, I think I can grant myself that much."
Hamlet had Horatio, one true friend to whom he could say, dying, "Tell my story." But even Prufrock has someone - has me - to whom he can say, "Let us go then, you and I."
Monday, January 30, 2012
Intrusive Thoughts
Everyone is always making a huge deal about how germ-infested bathrooms are. And yet I've heard doctors say there's almost nothing you can catch from, like, a toilet seat.
But what about flesh-eating bacteria? That is a real thing in the world - I saw it on Mystery Diagnosis. If someone with an infection of flesh-eating bacteria sat on this toilet seat, couldn't I catch it from them? I am 100% sure I could. In fact, how else would you catch a flesh-eating bacteria? The people who do have them, they never know.
And once you catch a flesh-eating bacteria, you have to die. And all your friends have to watch your face fall off.
What is the single creepiest thing in the world? There is only one answer to that question and it is flesh-eating bacteria.
And prions. It's a tie.
Something just poked me. Probably a poisonous spider crawling into my pants and biting me. I might not die, but I'll definitely loose a chunk out of this leg.
Please - PLEASE! - share your best intrusive thoughts in the comments below!!
But what about flesh-eating bacteria? That is a real thing in the world - I saw it on Mystery Diagnosis. If someone with an infection of flesh-eating bacteria sat on this toilet seat, couldn't I catch it from them? I am 100% sure I could. In fact, how else would you catch a flesh-eating bacteria? The people who do have them, they never know.
And once you catch a flesh-eating bacteria, you have to die. And all your friends have to watch your face fall off.
What is the single creepiest thing in the world? There is only one answer to that question and it is flesh-eating bacteria.
And prions. It's a tie.
Something just poked me. Probably a poisonous spider crawling into my pants and biting me. I might not die, but I'll definitely loose a chunk out of this leg.
 |
| Some people say Shylock was red-headed because Shakespeare was a racist. Actually the Bard was way ahead of his time in realizing that gingers have no soul. Also he was racist. |
Please - PLEASE! - share your best intrusive thoughts in the comments below!!
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Organization
Yesterday lingers in the living room - its blue leaf pendant necklace on the table, its sweater and socks on the floor, its flowers beginning to wilt in their vase. It seems to have settled here.
As far as I know, that blue leaf plastic pendant will occupy this intersection in space forever, unless I evict it, pick it up, carry it back into the dim closet and make it live in some other point, Point B, maybe.
When people say, "the past is gone," or whatever else similar thing people say, is it from ignorance or humility that they deny their powers?
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Walkers Don't Talk, or why this blog is so hard to spell
As I've mentioned before, this blog is largely about what
happens when I get a sandwich. Most of these posts started out as lunch break
scribbles, and in fact, the whole blog started because I went out one day to
get a sandwich.
There is a word for people like me, the real-life "walkers" who shamble about in your midst with their creepy blank stares and obvious lack of charisma. The word is "introverts."
Personality is a bit like soul, heart or mind – we are all pretty sure we have one, but when pressured to describe it, we can’t. At all. But we sure can presume things about other people.
Not everyone hates introverts. Some people pity us for the sad state of personal repression that is our every waking moment. Introverts respond to this pity with a blank stare, or perhaps an uncomfortable grin or a slightly raised eyebrow.
See, for non-introverts (we introverts call them "extraverts," they call themselves "normal people") talking is like a roiling white-water river of unobstructed self expression that surges robustly from their brain and gushes from their vocal cords. For introverts, talking is more like Dr. Livingstone trying to make his way through the whole African jungle with just a machete. We have to hack through a dense forest of thoughts and a thick undergrowth of feelings just to say a few words. No wonder we look lost.
For extraverts, that must sound outrageously laborious and pointless, considering you could just be more river-y and surge right over those trees like the Hoover Dam just collapsed. But for introverts, the way extraverts think is chaotic and disorganized, resulting in sweeping oversights and thoughtlessly offensive remarks. Believe me, for every introvert that has been thought boring, an extravert has been thought tasteless.
I'm not afraid to be myself. In fact, I quite enjoy myself. But for me and other introverts, talking isn't the best (and certainly isn't the only) way to enjoy ourselves. So I started this blog - a place for me to enjoy being me in ways that are more natural for me, and a place where other introverts might enjoy hearing from one of their kind, on anything that strikes her fancy. This blog is a way for me to connect more authentically with other people, a way for me to "put myself out there" to be known by people, since talking just doesn't typically do it for me.
Excuse me. I mean, since walkers don't talk.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, which operates on the premise that personalities are a thing and everyone has one, identifies me as an INFJ - Introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. (Each of these descriptors has an opposite - extraverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving - resulting in 16 different combinations.) For me, the introverted and intuitive categories are the most pronounced.
The "intuitive" piece means I'm interested in what's abstract and theoretical, making me even less fun at parties. I see things more as patterns than unique experiences, and I put a lot of faith in those patterns. I'm more interested in what something signifies than it what it actually accomplishes. Ultimately it will accomplish what it signifies - I know this because that is the pattern. See?
And so, adding the intuitive to the introverted moves me further and further away from "normal" in a culture that defines positive, outspoken, go-getters as attractive. These people are ambitious, fun-loving, and have "good people skills." People who want to stop you in the middle of your plan, write an essay about that plan's implications, and then relax by Facebooking their friends about critical essays regarding Lady Gaga are considered negative, nit-picking and antisocial. Also just weird.
Well, I'm not interested in proving my value to anyone. I've spent my life smiling like a maniac to prove that I'm not brooding or scared, which is what people assume when I don't talk. But here at Introverted Intuitive, I'm just being my introverted intuitive self. And I'm not ashamed to say, my brain trumps the real world every time.
As I sat alone in the food court, enjoying my spicy
Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich, I overheard a young woman describing all the
colleagues she didn’t like. And I heard her say about one woman, “She’s not a
bad person, she just has no personality.”
I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!?! If a person is quiet, or withdrawn, or
hard to get to know or figure out, it’s a sure sign that person is soulless and
empty on the inside.
I know because I am one of those people. I’m pretty much a
zombie. I see it in my dead, dark eyes when I look in the mirror. Right now I
hear the echo in my mindless skull.
 |
| We all know Walkers don't talk. The Walking Dead, Sunday nights on AMC. |
I’m not a bad person. I’m just impossible to like.
There is a word for people like me, the real-life "walkers" who shamble about in your midst with their creepy blank stares and obvious lack of charisma. The word is "introverts."
Introverts are widely believed to have no personality. Plenty of people have said that about me, I’m
sure. Now, you might expect me to say that introverts actually do have personality, in
spite of popular opinion, but I won’t say that. Because I don’t know what a
personality is.
Food Court Girl likes to gossip about coworkers. Is that
personality? Comedian Guy does nothing but tease you all the time. Is that
personality? Oversharing Man likes to talk about his traumatic childhood on
first meeting you. Team Mom isn’t your mom but likes to talk like she is. Sweetest
Lady in the World will send flowers if you’re in the hospital and OMG guys did
you see the last episode of Lost???
I know, Lost was a long time ago, but you get my point.
 |
"Do you have, like, any personality at all?"
"Do you have a brain at all?... And can I eat it?"
|
Personality is a bit like soul, heart or mind – we are all pretty sure we have one, but when pressured to describe it, we can’t. At all. But we sure can presume things about other people.
I love conspiracy theories involving the paranormal. Lady
Gaga is my hero. I’m a passionate, liberal feminist. I’m a good listener,
compassionate and patient with people. And I think, if there is such a thing as
a personality, I must have one. But not much of it will shine among the
cubicles - certainly not enough to inspire you to invite me out to get a sandwich.
Not everyone hates introverts. Some people pity us for the sad state of personal repression that is our every waking moment. Introverts respond to this pity with a blank stare, or perhaps an uncomfortable grin or a slightly raised eyebrow.
 |
| "Poor walkers. They have a soul, they're just afraid to show it, because they think they'll be judged." |
See, for non-introverts (we introverts call them "extraverts," they call themselves "normal people") talking is like a roiling white-water river of unobstructed self expression that surges robustly from their brain and gushes from their vocal cords. For introverts, talking is more like Dr. Livingstone trying to make his way through the whole African jungle with just a machete. We have to hack through a dense forest of thoughts and a thick undergrowth of feelings just to say a few words. No wonder we look lost.
 |
| When two introverts discover a common interest, they may ask, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" |
For extraverts, that must sound outrageously laborious and pointless, considering you could just be more river-y and surge right over those trees like the Hoover Dam just collapsed. But for introverts, the way extraverts think is chaotic and disorganized, resulting in sweeping oversights and thoughtlessly offensive remarks. Believe me, for every introvert that has been thought boring, an extravert has been thought tasteless.
 |
| I'm disgusting? Pardon me, sir, but your manners are disgusting. |
I'm not afraid to be myself. In fact, I quite enjoy myself. But for me and other introverts, talking isn't the best (and certainly isn't the only) way to enjoy ourselves. So I started this blog - a place for me to enjoy being me in ways that are more natural for me, and a place where other introverts might enjoy hearing from one of their kind, on anything that strikes her fancy. This blog is a way for me to connect more authentically with other people, a way for me to "put myself out there" to be known by people, since talking just doesn't typically do it for me.
Excuse me. I mean, since walkers don't talk.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator, which operates on the premise that personalities are a thing and everyone has one, identifies me as an INFJ - Introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. (Each of these descriptors has an opposite - extraverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving - resulting in 16 different combinations.) For me, the introverted and intuitive categories are the most pronounced.
 |
| "We are Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, and we posit that personality is a thing." |
The "intuitive" piece means I'm interested in what's abstract and theoretical, making me even less fun at parties. I see things more as patterns than unique experiences, and I put a lot of faith in those patterns. I'm more interested in what something signifies than it what it actually accomplishes. Ultimately it will accomplish what it signifies - I know this because that is the pattern. See?
 |
| Your plan is going to fail miserably. But you won't die, because you never do. |
And so, adding the intuitive to the introverted moves me further and further away from "normal" in a culture that defines positive, outspoken, go-getters as attractive. These people are ambitious, fun-loving, and have "good people skills." People who want to stop you in the middle of your plan, write an essay about that plan's implications, and then relax by Facebooking their friends about critical essays regarding Lady Gaga are considered negative, nit-picking and antisocial. Also just weird.
Well, I'm not interested in proving my value to anyone. I've spent my life smiling like a maniac to prove that I'm not brooding or scared, which is what people assume when I don't talk. But here at Introverted Intuitive, I'm just being my introverted intuitive self. And I'm not ashamed to say, my brain trumps the real world every time.
 |
| Did someone say brains? |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)