By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Who We Are
I took a personality test and found out I had none.
“You did once,” my wife said.
It was too big a hassle. So I erased it.
“Take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and find one again,” she said.
The MBTI assesses you, based on question replies, as one of 16 personalities. “Are you an Extravert or Introvert?”
Pervert.
“You’re supposed to pick one of the first two. How do you process data? Through Sensing or Intuition?”
It’s all fake news, I said. Except things I make up.
“On what do you base decisions? Thinking or Feeling?”
I can’t decide.
“Do you premise your outer life on Judging or Perceiving?”
I perceive these questions as too judgmental.
Myers-Briggs uses the first initials of the aforesaid four dichotomies to assign you a personality. For instance, an Extravert who prefers Sensing, Thinking and Judging is an ESTJ.
So you have too much estrogen? I asked my wife. This was bad thinking by me and judgment.
“I can think of a lot of four-letter terms for your type,” she said.
My research shows that we have no clue who we are. That’s why Myers-Briggs, horoscopes and so on are so seductive.
“If you’re not a person, you can’t have a personality,” said my wife. “Get out!”
We bought a doghouse 10 years ago. Our dog never used it. The thing sat empty until just recently. Lev, the only other male in our house, got cancer.
I was walking the Ox-Bow trail to the Crow’s Nest a couple months ago when the call came.
“Dad?”
“What, Flannery?”
“We’e driving Lev to the vet’s lab at Michigan State University. Mom needs your credit card number.”
The trails were as steep as the bills I knew would be coming. I braced myself on a tree, fished the card from my billfold as bugs devoured me and read the numbers. Call back when you hear what they say, I said.
She did an hour later. “Want to say goodbye to him?” We were both streaming tears.
Good dog, Lev! I said. I love you!
“He doesn’t recognize that.”
Lev, you idiot! Numbskull! Imbecile!
“He’s wagging his tail. Now he knows it’s you!”
My new doghouse digs aren’t as bad as my office. We’ve adopted a husky who also has dog-onality. Nova is easy to love but I still miss Lev, a retriever who didn’t retrieve and was scared of water. He’d grab random things in his mouth — trash, tin cans, food stolen from our cupboards, a bottle of sleeping pills he gulped whole and did not even make him drowsy, my bicycling shoes — and drag them down to his basement lair. There, he’d lay king on his throne of carnage.
Flannery, I told her. Lev was the worst dog ever.
“I miss him too,” she said. “How are you coming on a personality? Have you seen the film ‘Dumb and Dumber’?”
There were two of them.
“That’s a dichotomy you can start with.”
Are you referring to me missing my appointment to get our doors measured?
“Dad, we need new doors.”
Why?
“People can’t come in or go out without them.”
Exactly.
“But mostly those people are us.”
OK, I’ll re-set it, I conceded.
Was I D, D-er or D-est? I got thinking. Then I thought of The Doors, the ’60s rock band who put out “Light My Fire” and other hit songs.
Did you know Jim Morrison’s dad was an admiral? I asked my daughter.
“Jim who?”
The Doors’ lead singer. He exposed himself onstage, was a pathological drunk and died at age 27 choking on his vomit in a Paris bathtub.
“What a role model”
He was an INFP. So were Homer, St. Augustine and Shakespeare.
“How can that be if Myers-Briggs first came out in the 1940s?”
It’s amazing what science can do, I said.
