grinninfoole | I am a....

Is anyone else as puzzled as I regarding the appeal of the many "What ______ are you?" tests that many people seem to be citing in their journals? I actually find it slightly exasperating, which is unfair, really, and I'm not sure why. Certainly, I don't want anyone to feel bad about being amused or interested in something so innocuous. Yet, in the semi-privacy of my heart, I say to myself: What is the deal with these things?

One obvious notion is that the tests appeal to people who don't know who they really are. I shouldn't like to be too quick to assert that I do know, but part of the reason this occurs to me is that I have a sense that I DO know who I am, even if I can't quite say.

I suppose that, if I were a B5 character, the Vorlon question wouldn't stump me half so much as the Shadow question: what do I want? (Is the answer 43? Dammit, where's my magic Bonnieball when I need it??)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

grinninfoole.livejournal.com

My friend Shadow has a personal superstition about the number 43--he considers a sign of ill omen, and sees its ubiquity as a sign that the cosmos is fundamentally out to get us. As far as I know, there is no connection to the Hitchhiker's Guide books.

If I recall correctly, Ayn Rand really annoyed me, though I can no longer recall why. I did enjoy the Rush album 2112, which owed something to her ideas.

As to who I am: well, my name is Mike, for what that's worth. I am student of the history of science. I talk too much, spend too much time playing games, and I have ADD. None of that really answers the question, of course, but I don't know how to verbalize a better response. Though it's interesting how much of what I just defines me by negatives. Does that reveal something about my attitudes, or is it simply linked to our perceptual hardwiring, which is designed to pick up contrasts and boundaries?

And if you don't mind my asking, who are you? And how did you happen to come to read my journal?

From:

chinachewy.livejournal.com

well mike, I am just crazy. I was surfing the web one day and selected random and i saw your comments and decided to make a friend...

From:

grinninfoole.livejournal.com

Sounds good. So, do your friends call you China,or just Chewy?

From:

chinachewy.livejournal.com

just chewy thank you...

From:

grinninfoole.livejournal.com

Chewy it is, then. So tell me, are you crazy because you don't understand other people, or because other people don't understand you? For me, I'd say my problem is that I don't understand other people, but the reason I am so often told that I am weird is that my actions don't fit their expectations. I enjoy this at times, but often it really puzzles me.

From:

chinachewy.livejournal.com

I am crazy because no one understands me and at the same time i don't want to be understood. I am considered crazy to my friends because i give but dont want to receive. I am crazy to me because i am different?? maybe you understand people too much. everyone is almost the same. there is only one goal in a person's live. their Personal Legend. (THe Alchemist by Paulo Coelho) On the other hand, you being called weird is confusing. are you actions more than what you expect or are they less than what you expect. or is it the expectation that changed? do you believe in fate?

From:

grinninfoole.livejournal.com

I don't know any works by Paulo Coelho, so the Alchemist is new to me. What is this Personal Legend? It sounds appealing--I often have this sense of how my life would appear at various moments to an audience. I don't know that it's everyone's goal in life, and I'm not sure what you mean by everyone is almost the same.

People call me 'weird' because...uh, well, I'm not sure. I think it's because I'm somewhat oblivious to social conventions. I'd have to ask my friends for a better answer.

As for fate--yes and no. I believe that past, present and future all co-exist, and that the past and future are just as 'real' as the present, which is all that we seem to experience. Granting that assumption, I therefore see the future as fixed in the same way the past is fixed--it has already 'happened' in the same way that the past has, except that we don't remember it (at least, not reliably.) Since we don't remember it, however, we do still effectively have free will because we don't know what will result from our choices. If we could perceive time holographically, it might be a different matter. Alan Moore has played with these concepts interestingly in some of his work, notably in Watchmen and From Hell.

From:

chinachewy.livejournal.com

A Personal Legend is something that you always wanted to accomplish. It does not neccessarily have to be something you are good at. Neither does it have to be something that you feel obligated to do. It is what your heart tells you. I was told by my family and teachers that i would make the best engineer and that is what i should do for the rest of my life. However, i can see myself as an engineer, but my passion is in english and theology. After reading The Alchemist, i realized that you only live once. The moral of the story is to do what you want to do now before it is too late. I will always have engineering to fall back on if english and theology dont work out. That is my personal legend.

as for why i said that everyone is almost the same, is because you said that you don't know people. Everyone has a mom and dad. everyone has a personal legend. everyone is the same. they all have a soul and a conscience.

Do you believe that the greatest lie in the world is at a point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate?

i believe that it is a lie. either way we still control our own lives. we make our decisions that effect our lives forever. yesterday my sister and i went shopping for wrapping paper. We were debating whether to go left or to go right. we played paper rock scissors to see which way fate told us to go. Fate told us left but my sis still chose right. she had a feeling that right was the right way to go.

From:

grinninfoole.livejournal.com

I once read an interesting insight into the difference between classical tragedy and modern tragedy. I can't find the passage right now, though I think it appears in Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire. If I could get to my closet, I check the copy I have set aside to give out as a gift some time. Anyway, for the Greeks, tragedy derived from a character flaw, a conflict between impulses (even entirely virtuous ones) that led the hero to choose his own destruction. Today, tragedy might best be envisioned as a combination of circumstances, choices made in the absence of full knowledge, that lead to narrower and narrower ranges of options, until, at the moment of crisis, one has no options left, and disaster ensues. MacLean's book, about Smokejumpers and the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, is predicated on this view, as are Walter Lord's two studies of the Titanic, A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On. (In fact, it maybe the latter of these where I first saw this idea.) Anyway, I'm not sure how this connects to fate. Who is to blame for the things that go wrong in life? Or for the things that go right?

I guess that I don't know my own personal legend, or I at least don't really embrace it. Something to work to change.

I don't know what the soul is (or what you mean by it, anyway) so I don't know that I agree that everyone has one. In the Aristotelian sense, yes, we do, but if one links the soul to conscience, to a sense of empathy and self-evaluation, it seems clear that we don't all have one, as a belief that only the self and its experiences are real is common to sociopaths. Put more plainly, folks like Jeffery Dahmer don't see other people as real, and thus their suffering elicits no more sympathy than Wile E. Coyote. Do such people have a conscience? Do they have a soul? Are they really people at all? (I would argue that, except in a biological sense, no, they are not.)

What sort of theology interests you? What sort of stories do you like to read?