Friday, March 03, 2006

To thine own self...

Tuesday I was at the annual dinner/fundraiser for a local nonprofit, and during one of the many speeches I realized mid-chuckle that I was the only person at my table attempting to acknowledge the speaker's bad humor. I give pity laughs. I never realized that. But the funny thing is, the only reason I am reminded of this rather recent moment of "Crap, do I really do that?" is because thanks to Winnekat, I took yet another one of those personality-awareness tests. (The kind my sister the pychology major hated. This one was different, though, it had these cool little interactive charts. )

I came up as a Benevolent Creator, which sounds a bit like I'm some smiling goddess and should start my own religion. (Shout-out to M-N for the pic...)

At any rate, that was a little odd, because usually on those personality tests I come up as uber-Type A, dependable, stoic, and unemotional. (Four years ago I went through this training program to work with the oh-so-tragic at-risk youth. We had to do one of those personality tests, and out of about 20 mentors, there were only two others who were Analyzers. We were assigned different projects, and we always ended up being the most efficient, because the Feelers were busy making sure everyone was loved, the Dominants were follower-less, and the Introverts couldn't talk to each other. I tried to argue with the workshop leaders that most people are bits of each, depending on the situation, but they didn't listen.)

Anyway, I like Winnekat's test better. It wasn't as one-dimensional, as the interactive graphs illustrate. And there are pretty colors....

True dat.

7 comments:

Xtina said...

i'm a free-wheeling creator apparently. the weird thing is -- i just got done reading Divided by Faith and so i'm in this "avoid white evangelical notions of individualism and anti-structuralism" mode. and some of those questions, the agency ones especially, didn't leave a lot of room for structural influence -- did you think? there were times when it said "persons of power" but in general, the choices for influence it was "my own choices" or "luck"?

or did i totally just take the fun out of it?

Rainster said...

I also thought that, and every time one of those questions came up I deliberately moved it as far away from the "agency" side as I could. (Mentally, I was on this "our individual situations are products of a series of historical and structural events/ we control the choice but not the choices" vein.) Which is probably why my "empathy," "trust in others" and "femininity" category rankings are higher than I expected. (It's interesting, too, the gender definitions are not explained...)

Torgo said...

I'm a considerate inventor. That seems right. Did you ever think that the administration sets up those sites to find suspected terrorists who are also curious about their personality, and then when the test says "you are a potential terrorist," the feds swoop in and send the person to Guantanamo?

No, me neither. They couldn't figure out who sent anthrax through their own postal system.

Xtina said...

my femininity was really high too! gender scales of personality test are really arbitrary. i mean, you're more feminine if you think people are affected by circumstances outside of their own control?

i actually scored low on empathy -- maybe that because i don't like people. JUST kidding.

Rainster said...

How vastly does Torgo's Considerate Inventor differ from my Benevolent Creator?

Xtina said...

and how different is free-wheeling from benevolent. here's mine if you want to check it out:
http://personaldna.com/report.php?k=oqpNNoEsOoBftXe-HI-CDADA-f459&u=dacc2287d8ae

Rainster said...

I assumed free-wheeling was kind of like free-spirited.