Stupid Internet Survey: Personality tests.

What’s your personality type?

ESFP: The Performer

You are a natural performer and happiest when you’re entertaining others. A great friend, you are generous, fun-loving and optimistic. You love to laugh—and you like almost all people equally. You accept life as it is, and you do your best to make each day fantastic. You would make a good actor, designer, or counselor.

Your #2 Match:	ESTP: The Doer
Your #3 Match:	ENFP: The Inspirer
Your #4 Match:	ENTP: The Visionary
Your #5 Match:	ISFP: The Artist

What’s your personality type?
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Just out of curiosity I took a personality test. It’s off the internet so I don’t expect the results to be all that scientific.

The last time I took one of these things was in 1987 and I wound up an INTP. So either my mind has been taken over by aliens or two-thirds of my personality has joined the dark side. What’s more likely is that this test is just plain wrong. I am not an extrovert. I like people; but I also like a lot of alone time. As to the career choices:

1. I tried acting, and I am not good at it; I’m too egocentric.
2. I was a graphic designer for four years and got thoroughly tired of the pretentious jerks that the business is clogged with.
3. I don’t like listening to people complain about their problems because 80 percent of the time they won’t do a bloody thing to change things.

But I’m not going to knock the rest of the description of me.

…Then again, who would? All these personality types have nice, positive, fortune-cookie-like statements to make about anyone who takes the bloody test. Everyone’s a “doer,” “achiever,” “artist.” No one’s a “functionary,” “drone,” “space-filler,” “pain in the ass,” etc. Just once I’d like to see one of these tests respond, “You are an unpleasant, obnoxious person. Please live alone.” But these tests never ask questions about disorders.

For the most part, I am suspicious of these tests because I keep running into their pseudo-scientific cousins—the tests that determine whether you’re sanguine, melancholy, choleric, or phlegmatic. This comes from Hippocrates and Galen’s theory that health comes from a proper balance of four liquids (or “humors”)—blood, black bile, yellow bile, or phlegm—which are related to air, earth, fire, and water. Of course, if you’re too sanguine of a person, this means you can always be cured by a good bleeding.

Personality types are too complex to be easily sorted into 16 categories based on four factors that are loosely based on ancient Greek science. Besides, personalities change over time. People mature, realize which things are more important to them, get rid of hypocrisies and inconsistencies (or find excuses—which work for them—for such behavior) and once they determine who they “are,” they spend the rest of their lives conforming to their self-generated stereotypes. It’s particularly sad if they can’t stand who they are; such are the people I met in my counseling groups.

My new hall doesn’t smell as much like ass as my last hall! So that’s nice.

I suspect it may have had something to do with the bathroom doors being open all the time. The bathroom doors here are spring-closed; poorly ventilated, but all the smells do stay in the bathroom.