Some excessive navel gazing
Oct. 22nd, 2003 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levertovfan Sometimes I think I'm losing the sensetivity I used to have to other people's emotional states and/or the ability to respond appropriately. When I was in elementary and middle school, my parents, my therapists and my godmother Cindy always used to compliment me on my ability to listen to people's problems and respond sensetively. Cindy, to whom at the age of ten and elevenish I guess I was something of a therapist, would always say I should be a therapist. Was this just the survival insistinct of a child dealing with an increasingly fractitious household? My Myers-Briggs type is an INFJ, the Counselor. Linda, my stepmother, uses Myers-Briggs typology a lot both in her line of work and in her personal life, and the varieties of evidence for it that she and my father have learned about in the Myers-Briggs association to which they belong are pretty convincing. One thing that can happen, Myer-Briggs materials claim, is that environment can turn people away from their natural preferences. I'm an "F", a feeler. This means that given some choice, my first instinct is to consult how I feel about something. As an INFJ, and I forget in what combination this arises, my first instinct is to ask how this choice corresponds to my values. This is true both for the abstract model and for, well, me. Now the weird thing is, most of my friends, and the people I've chosen to surround myself with, are Ts. In some ways, extroverted Fs(EFs), make me uncomfortable and most Fs are extroverted. Do EFs, people who go around talking about their feelings off the top of their heads, remind me of my mom and Cindy? Or is it just that I don't always want to listen to it if people haven't processed it internally before saying it? Linda frequently reminds me that when Diana goes on about something, she is processing it for herself for the first time. Diana is a particularly E-y sort of EF. I wonder if my F-ness is going into decline.
In other news, I'm working on my fascism paper. More precisely, I'm still doing the reading for it and every time I try to start writing it, I start arguing with myself or trying to figure out what my thesis is. At the moment, I've got a title and a very lengthy (but properly formatted!) bibliography. What I need to do, and I know this, is just start writing as though the whole class wasn't going to see and critique it. Soon time limitations will force this to happen.
Alessandra, the person designated as my primary critic, scares me. She's very postmodern and able to go on for a very long time about details. I can usually think my way around her if she's , err, off. I often did for her caucus posts in colloquim. But it's difficult to figure out what her main points are or if she has any. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it adaquately on the spot. Of course, that's not the point of the presentation, but the thing is, when people critique me, I feel compelled to defend myself, silly person that I am. I'm staring up at my Murphy's Laws posters and one of its maxims is "Never argue with a fool, people might not know the difference". I'm tempted to rewrite that, inserting postmodernist where fool would go. Don't mistake me: Alessandra is no fool; she's got a subtle mind, which is how the post-modernism crept in. I think of Bill, my Czech Republic program leader, and of how he could talk nebulously for hours on end and his frequent insertion of quotation marks around perfectly innocent words. He's certainly proof post-modernism warps minds.
In other news, I'm working on my fascism paper. More precisely, I'm still doing the reading for it and every time I try to start writing it, I start arguing with myself or trying to figure out what my thesis is. At the moment, I've got a title and a very lengthy (but properly formatted!) bibliography. What I need to do, and I know this, is just start writing as though the whole class wasn't going to see and critique it. Soon time limitations will force this to happen.
Alessandra, the person designated as my primary critic, scares me. She's very postmodern and able to go on for a very long time about details. I can usually think my way around her if she's , err, off. I often did for her caucus posts in colloquim. But it's difficult to figure out what her main points are or if she has any. I'm not sure I'll be able to do it adaquately on the spot. Of course, that's not the point of the presentation, but the thing is, when people critique me, I feel compelled to defend myself, silly person that I am. I'm staring up at my Murphy's Laws posters and one of its maxims is "Never argue with a fool, people might not know the difference". I'm tempted to rewrite that, inserting postmodernist where fool would go. Don't mistake me: Alessandra is no fool; she's got a subtle mind, which is how the post-modernism crept in. I think of Bill, my Czech Republic program leader, and of how he could talk nebulously for hours on end and his frequent insertion of quotation marks around perfectly innocent words. He's certainly proof post-modernism warps minds.
