Well, needless to say, I got busy last month and didn’t get around to writing this entry. It also doesn’t help that my dad tried to change out the old hard drive at the time; not that I’m worried about it, it’s not as if I have readers. Lately I’ve an interest in personality type theory, unfortunately, I’ve gotten so caught up in details of it that I’ve been unable to determine my type. Or perhaps I’m just in denial. (History warning, I read it and I find it dull, so if you don’t like reading through junk like that, please skip to the following paragraph. I knew that something like this would happen when I decided to discuss my “search for type” and thus I’ve been procrastinating doing it. I finally ran out of excuses for not doing this and am now using it to put other things off.”) When I first picked of “Please Understand Me II” by Keirsey, I started by reading the INTJ description because my career counselor, who had been helping to determine my type, had done this exercise with me, prior to seeing my actual type, and I had picked INTJ from her shallow description of each type. I read a brief description of both the INFJ and the INTJ that she gave me and neither of which really seemed to ping with me. Anyways, flash forward to Keirsey, INTJ didn’t seem to fit so I read the INFJ description. Having neglected to read, or perhaps its not even in there, the part about not discarding a type due to one little thing, I ended up rejecting INFJ over the whole psychic stuff because although I do sometimes make little predictions about the future, they are more educated guesses than actual ‘visions’. So I read INFP. I was feeling pretty good about it as my type until I hit the stuff about INFPs disregarding logic, and not being very logical. I took offense, and rejected the type. Then I started delving into cognitive development theories. I began to learn about Ni, Ne, Si, se, Fi, Fe, Ti, and Te; I came across this through www.INFJ.com. A lot of this actually happened simultaneously, as well as looking a temperament theory, which I’m trying to get back to, although I’m having a hard time prying myself away from the cognitive functions because they are so interesting! I want to learn to recognize them in myself! I’ve taken this little test that I found that is supposed to test how developed a function. Both times that I’ve taken it I’ve come out Ni, then Ne. I can’t decide if this is more funny, or sad. So, I decided that it’s inaccurate. The alternative is that I’m just plain messed up… heh. The first test said that my development most closely resembled an INFJ, the second time I took it, last Tuesday I took it again and it told me that I most closely resembled an INTJ. The test also said that it was not intended for finding ones type, although I still include it because the only time I seem to test out as anything other than INFJ, is when these cognitive functions are somehow tested. Sorry for being so dull to any poor soul who is reading this, I just made a commitment to myself to write this up, and thus I did it. I’m still not sure which temperament I’m apart of. The only temperament that I really hope I’m not of is the Guardian temperament. Keirsey describes guardian children as being unmotivated and as being frustrating to Rational parents because they have no goals, or something like that, and are just going to grow up to be ‘pillars of society’. I often don’t share my imagination with people, thus I act like a Guardian, I love it when I find that I won’t be docked for being creative. Although I often find myself disregarding my own ideas, and not following them through, going with familiar method, but this doesn’t increase my self-image. I often regret not following my ideas; particularly in debate. So often after rounds I’d find that if I’d done my strat, instead of doing what my partner wanted to and sticking to the strat that was given to us to go against a case, that we would’ve won. For example, we were going against a critical, meaning that it had a philosophical framework to it, affirmative plan that involved doing something with the UN, and the framework essentially said that you had to vote for them because they were at least taking a step against genocide, which is better than doing nothing. Earlier, the policy captain had given us a strat that involved saying that genocide was hard to recognize and was a counter-Kritik to the framework. The judge was anti-Kritik, so I wanted to run my combo of withdraw from the UN counter plan and the go solve the problem unilaterally counter plan along with the UN quagmire disadvantage which basically says that the UN is corrupt and which almost no one can beat. My partner didn’t want to that and thought we could just run the counter-Kritik and be fine with it. Even though I knew in my heart that this wouldn’t work, I went along with it to keep my partner happy. I can be such an idiot at times. My idea would’ve worked! We would’ve won with it! ARG! I’d often noticed little things in the case or in the things that were said in the cross-examination period following the speeches that our strat wouldn’t work and I still went along with it! GRRRR! EVEN WHEN I HAD A DIFFERENT STRAT IN MIND! I just wanted to keep my partner happy, and I doubted myself, I thought that I might be wrong. Nothing is perfect. I didn’t trust myself. THAT IS SO GUARDIAN OF ME AND I HATE IT! Perhaps this is my problem, perhaps I am a Guardian and just don’t want to accept it. I might be an ISTJ in denial. That depresses me and I have a hard time accepting that, just as I have a hard time accepting the INFP because of their stance on logic. Although how a Guardian gets docked for not being coach able at debate camp I’ll never know. Yeah, for a short time after debate camp I loved myself, I trusted myself, and I felt confident. I will admit that I was more argumentative afterwards too. Then I got back to school, was made fun of for several things, for several weeks by my ‘friend’ who doesn’t know where the line is between bullying and teasing, everything from the way I walk, to the way I talk, to the time that I accidentally picked up the pink dole instead of the red dole that I wanted. She just made fun of me for everything that I did, in debate, and the clothes that I wear. She just doesn’t know when to stop, or that when you start hurting people is when you cross the line between teasing and bullying. This line is different for everyone, and if you can’t watch people to see when you cross that line, then you should not be teasing people. I may also be Guardian because I usually don’t get mad at people until they hurt someone else, then the pain I felt turns into anger for both my pains and the other person’s pain. But I have no strength to tell that person, so I avoid them until I’m ready to forgive and go back, all the while daydreaming about chewing them out. I also doubt being a Guardian for other reasons, such as my rejecting ‘Murphy’s Law’ but the reason why I reject might be Guardian esc because I empirically deny it. Murphy’s law states that what can go wrong, will go wrong. If that were true, I’d be dead by now. You see when I was younger my parents liked to go to national parks a lot. There are tons of them in Utah which is where I live, and I can clearly remember looking over the edge of one of the paths at Bryce Canyon National park and having my dad come up to me in order to tell me that I was too close to the edge and that if I fell I’d probably die. If Murphy’s Law were true, I would’ve died there, or I would’ve gotten into a car accident and died on the way down. Therefore, just because something can go wrong, doesn’t mean it will, it’s just not logical to assume that things that can go wrong always will. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep a first aid kit and a spare tire in my car when I finally get one, after, things still can go wrong, it’s just not absolute, and I’m sure most Guardians would agree with me. Or so I hope, just because I don’t think it’s that healthy to be THAT paranoid. Especially when the logic is that clear, I mean, who would be crazy enough to take that law literally and seriously. That ‘law’ I actually find a bit annoying. Along with the supposed ‘fashion laws’ which I am grateful aren’t around that much anywhere, all that junk about when to wear what colors just because of what time of year it is, although I will accept it when it comes to funerals and weddings just because it’s symbolic. I also don’t have a great aversion to new technology; on the contrary, I was one of the first people in my Multimedia Production class to get a ‘Memory Stick’. One of the fictional ISTJs that I know of had a way of either being absolutely funny and lovable to me, or being incredibly annoying! I’m talking about Puddleglum, from ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. I can also be rather referential, I’ll quote people that I know, usually recent quotes- I have a friend who’s very insulted by the fact that I don’t remember the conversations we had in fifth grade, and I have a special connection with entropy. My connection with entropy is based off my own odd interpretation of it. Namely, that nothing ever really goes away, it just gets moved around, rearranged, and changed, but it still keeps its basic components. The actual theory of entropy talks about how mess is inevitable. I learned that in Physics class, it was an awesome class, the people in it made it great because every time Mr. Stephenson did a demonstration, no matter how simple, we’d all clap and cheer. It was like having our own personal Bill Nye the Science guy! ~Amyelk Out