Thursday, April 14, 2011

Interesting

Well, after being profiled as arrogant, I went to take this rather disturbing test, and got this result.

Thoughtful to the extreme, you are often obsessed with perfection and the rules governing your own personal interests. Your world is black and white. You love to work within a logical system, such as language, computer programming, or mathematics. Manipulating a system that can be completely understood is a distinct pleasure to you, because of your confidence in the underlying veracity of your belief system. Because of your appreciation for logic and order, those who speak or think in a sloppy manner are apt to generate more than their share of wrath. Although very amiable, you are not drawn to friendships out of a sense of personal need. You are just as happy by yourself with a good book or puzzle. Because you are so involved with thought, you will on occasion have difficulty dealing with the day-to-day problems of a normal life. Taking out the trash, doing the dishes, these are often left until the last possible moment, if at all.


It's interesting, because on the one hand, I think I see the world in more shades of gray than most people. On the other hand, I do get annoyed very easily by relatively small things, and my house is indeed a mess, and I often forget about birthdays, holidays, bills due, and other obligations because I'm caught up in thinking about other things. It's one of the things that helped kill my marriage, the fact that I would drift off as my wife was telling me something, either thinking about something I had been wrestling with before she started talking, or toying with a story idea that occurred to me from something she said, or worst of all, chasing a completely random thread of connections, as something she said reminded me of something that reminded me of something else which reminded me of something else, so by the time she finished talking, I would be thinking about something three subjects removed. I wasn't trying to be rude or dismissive. It's just the broken way my mind works.

Then again, these summaries are often written like horoscopes, in that they deal in generalities that could apply to virtually anyone. So who knows? But the test itself is kind of disturbing.

ETA: One other thing that occurs to me, though, is the opening comment that I am drawn to language because I like working with logical systems. I must say, I became interested in linguistics when I was an Army linguist, and in the similarities and differences between languages. In other words, I was interested in language as a sort of abstract subject for study, but was much less effective when it came to actually speaking and conversing in the language with other people. So that seems to be pretty spot-on as well.

No comments: