Wednesday, August 25, 2010

prospects

I often find myself very excited and motivated by the prospect of accomplishing a number of different things. But being equally enticed by all I end up unable to focus or get fully involved enough in any of them so that none of them actually gets done. I feel stuck in a state of anticipation and unrealised potential. I really want to do all these things, but somehow actually doing them seems to elude me. I end up wasting time in less interesting, though apparently quite engrossing persuits such as sorting and re-organizing things on my desktop, or doing dishes.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Owlish

sometimes I feel that if it stayed dark all the time I would stay energized longer. I always seem to feel wide awake and feel like I could stay up all day early in the morning, but then shortly after it becomes light I start to feel that perhaps I am tired after all. In any case I find that I really do enjoy being awake at night so very much more than being awake in the day. I love the dim quiet hours, the cool sweet air. I like to sleep during the bright warm hours of the day, I hardly miss them. I thoroughly enjoy being nocturnal :D

Thursday, August 12, 2010

facebook

I really want to enjoy it with my friends who do, but it always seems to make me irritated.

I like making profiles about myself, I like seeing other people's profiles about themselves, I like posting pictures and seeing other's pictures, I like being able to write blog-like entries and have people respond, I like sending people cute little gifts or whatever that let them know I'm thinking of them. But I just can't seem to enjoy being on facebook.

I think partly it feels too extraverted. All those random updates on the news feed and the wall about what people are doing and saying to other people on there feels like, well....... like a horribly cluttered room to a neat-freak. I feel beffuddled and overwhelmed, slightly dirty, and, moreover, uninterested. It feels like it's trying to make me a busy body, which is annoying.

I also dislike the sense I get that many people on there assume that because you have a profile your life ought to be an open book to them. Although I don't check it often enough myself, I feel like people I barely know are checking up on my status (or whatever) constantly. What? I don't even talk to them in real life.

Of course that's a BIG part of the problem, there's not a good distinction between actual friends and people who are aquaintances. It feels rude to refuse people you know in some capacity when they ask to add you on there, but they're not really asking to be your actual friend. They have no intention of getting to know you well, hanging out with you, being there when you need someone. They are merely an aquaintance. Furthermore, even if I don't add a lot of these periferal people as my friends, if they know some of my actual friends that I have added, they still get notifications of things my real friends have said or sent to me. They still see the new pictures my friends upload of me. So why even bother to not add them?

They also seem to feel the need to send you millions of notifications apart from the automatic newsfeed ones. Kill the Sith with me, Accept a gift of Strawberries on Farmville, Somebody Hugged you - do something back!, Someone liked the movie you want to see, Someone tagged you in some random note, blah blah blah. Now, don't get me wrong. Some of these activities are fun, or at least look like fun. But somehow they just don't seem to hold my attention long enough to get into them.

I know I know, there are privacy settings, you can turn things off, you can not share your info with applications. Yes, but it seems like all that is what Facebook is all about....so I wonder to myself, why even be on there?

Now, I love making profiles which is why I joined in the first place......but I guess I like them better when they sit there quietly and aquire comments about what I've posted/shared. All these other comments and, and... things just feel like a muddle to me.

The other big problem is the layout and those horrible adds. I hate the adds. Whenever I am on a page with adds I try to leave as quickly as possible - which is every page with facebook. I also hate the way everything is crammed together in narrow collumns with tons of white space all around it. Somehow for me it's just super hard to focus on anything. I don't feel comfortable on any of the pages. ....and I also don't really enjoy the blue.

One last thing I find really annoying about it is that it displays all the most recent pictures of you uploaded by other people first, so people aren't going to see the pictures you like of yourself. Most likely it'll be some awfull group shot where you've got red-eye or something. It's really annoying. And people can just upload pictures of you and tag you in them whenever they like and you can't do anything about it. But not only that - then everyone they know is notified that they've uploaded these pictures. bah!

I'm really toying with the idea of quitting it alltogether.....I don't know. Can I mass remove "friends" and pare it down to just the people I actually know well? - without insulting everyone?
Should I just remove pretty much everything on there, and then just not check it anymore?
I don't know. I really want it to be fun. It feels like it has the potential to be fun.....if it wasn't crawling with all those people I barely know, stupid notifications, and adds!

Friday, August 06, 2010

why I like kiersy best

Today I started some more research into what I hope to someday turn into a website - one that compares, links to, and brings together...synthesizes might be the word...different personality theories. I'm most familiar with the Kiersy Temperament Sorter/Meyers-Briggs theory, and I was wondering what other things are out there, and wanting to take a closer look at them. Yet it seems to keep being confirmed to me just why it's the Kiersy theory that I'm...well rather obsessed with. Finally I was provoked into writing a bit while starting to read (trying for probably the 3rd time or so) Personality Types Using the Enneagram for Self-discovery by Don Riso.

The problem I have with the enneagram, as well as many other personality theories (which I don’t see so much in the Kiersy books -Please Understand Me) is that most other theorists focus so much on the negative and make it sound like all these personalities are dysfunctional. The fact is that most people have their problems, it's a given, but it’s more usefull to look at the basic neutral personality, not nessesarily all it’s problems, at least not right up front. Of course it can be interesting or helpfull to note how different personalities may handle emotional/psychological problems, but that should be just one aspect, not the focus of the profile for any given type. Much more focus should be on the underlying traits which can be expressed either good or bad. The good ways that personalities are expressed ought to be emphasized because people will be impacted much more for the good by identifying their individuality in a positive light. Smacking people in the face with their faults is not a good way to make them open to understanding themselves and others. Reading a berating of your personality in a profile might help you learn something, but probably isn't going to make you feel excited about understanding the concepts, and reading a berating of other people's types will just make you more judgemental of others, rather than helping you appreciate their differences.

I also find, though I hadn’t specifically thought about it till reading a note about it on wikipedia, that I much prefer the personality theories which focus on individual traits and how they look when grouped in different ways, rather than the sets of supposedly all encompassing types. Those "type" ones all seem to have the same problem: you can identify a lot with some aspects of one type, and identify a lot with other aspects of a different one. They paint a picture of stereotypes, but don't allow for all the different variations, nor the degrees of different traits.

Looking at individual traits makes much more sense, and allows for the variety of unique people you see in real life, rather than stereotyping, or "pidgeon-holing". While there may be some very basic underlying characteristics which can be used to group people into relatively few categories, the "type" theories tend to offer much more detail about one group than can be applied to all of it's members. Looking at traits is also usefull in that it helps explain why different types act certain ways. It’s not just that you happen to be like this random type someone came up with, but you can observe individual traits in yourself as they affect different thoughts, motives, actions, and reactions.

I find that the Kiersy method of looking at several spectrums of traits individually allows for much more individual accuracy and deeper understanding of the inner workings of unique people. In the books, while there are 16 combinations of the 4 spectrums, it also makes note of the strength of each of the preferred traits. I think this alerts people to realizing that they are free to read the profiles with a grain of salt. No one is telling them they are exactly like this profile - this is a basic profile outlining different traits which they may identiy with to varying degrees depending on the strength of their trait preferences. It helps people understand better why they may be similar to different people in different ways, by recognizing shared or opposing traits. The trait method to personality theory presents people as unique combinations of many underlying traits - essentially presenting humanity on a spectrum, whereas the type theories present people in a segregated fashion - as being part of just one group, one type. In trait theories one can learn about other types of people while reading one's own profile, whereas in type theories the information is usually presented as only applying to your type and the similarities with others is not noted. Of course I admit to not having read other theories in as great detail as I have the Meyers-Briggs, so perhaps they do a better job in the details than I have seen.

Something I have been thinking about in regards to the Kiersy books is that I think it is also usefull to look at how trait preferences play out in different contexts. People may be more one way in certain situations, and more another way in other situations. It does talk a bit about the opposite traits in Please Understand Me II, but I felt like more discussion and examples of how being on a spectrum plays out would be usefull. I also think it would be interesting to read more discussion of how the different traits affect eachother. Such as - how does Thinking look in conjunction with iNtuition vs. how it looks when coupled with Sensing. Or how might Introversion look in a Feeling person vs. a Thinking person.

well, now I have typed much longer than I intended, but I feel a bit better and might be able to attempt reading more of the enneagram book, although I may be forced to write about my disapproval again. I'm certainly not looking forward to wading through the looooong negative profiles provided in it.