Archive of things to do with 'personality'

• 03.21.08 Learning about character:

  A friend of mine surprised me last night. I know him about as well as I know anyone, though I don’t see him that often - he doesn’t see anyone that often. I know his interests, I know how he behaves when he’s upset, I know how he’s most comfortable and I know his own particular way of undermining himself. I am familiar with a range of motions and postures and it’s easy to pose him in my mind to match whatever position in whatever diorama I want to fit him in. But I didn’t expect to see what I saw and it makes me wonder what I have learned about him at all. Learning as a concept has been tying me in knots recently, and I get lost trying to think about what makes up character as well.

  We biked up to visit him with a bucket of compost from our apartment, we’ve been helping make mulch for the garden.

  
  Tags: reading, personality, thinking, money, anxiety, perception, character, politics, learning.
• 11.27.07 Message in a bottle:

  Listening to the radio the other day I heard a program (sort of) about the 1977 Voyager spacecraft, launched into space with a golden record and other goodies; the hosts of the show talked to several moderately well-known people and asked what they would include. Philip Glass, for instance, would include Bach and Tuvan throat-singing (details unspecified); Neil Gaiman would include the The Wizard of Oz, among other things. Several of the folks interviewed included things it would be difficult to include on a gold record: mandarin oranges in syrup, or an entire meal at Chez Panisse. Naturally, this got me thinking…

  
  Tags: self, reading, personality, change, taste, travel, detail, project, boredom, philosophy, thinking, water, fear, library, future, letters, language, context, value, music, unfinished, rhythm, mood, pace, time, smell, idle, anxiety, performance, perception, concept, kaleidoscope, level, character, arrogance, navigation, politics, cicada, memory, dream.
• 04.10.07 Stray thoughts:

  I used to think: faces are like characters, or they match them. It might seem that people don’t look like who they are, but you think that because you haven’t understood yet what they look like. I also used to think (and I’ll still say it, if I’m feeling pressured) that people aren’t who they are:

  
  Tags: personality, work, management, turkey, philosophy, simile, money, idle, perception, character, arrogance, politics, history, comics, illustration.
• 04.03.07 Levelling:

  What strikes me more and more now as I am rereading this book is how many different ways it finds to reflect its facets on each other. I’m not sure where to find the point of origin of any of its themes. Or are they themes, like melodies in a piece of music, subject to repetition, variation, and inversion? - or are they more like the instruments, themselves invariant, producing the infinite variety of melody?

  
  Tags: personality, psychology, regression, travel, detail, language, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques, perception, concept, kaleidoscope, level.
• 04.03.07 Performance anxiety:

  It’s always best to begin with questionable etymology, no matter what the subject. (See, Heidegger did teach me something after all.) Wikipedia says (today) that the word sin ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *es-, to be. Provocative!

  
  Tags: self, personality, psychology, shame, writing, heidegger, thinking, drained, fear, failure, future, currency, unfinished, rhythm, mood, pace, time, ambition, fatigue, anxiety, performance, sin.
• 04.01.07 Those magic caskets:

  I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt; I wished I had not trodden that ground as myself, but as Bernier, Tavernier or Manucci did … Once embarked upon, this guessing game can continue indefinitely. When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savages have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and Thevet? For every five years I move back in time, I am able to save a custom, gain a ceremony or share in another belief.

  
  Tags: reading, personality, change, travel, detail, dialogue, philosophy, thinking, nationalism, fear, research, ghost, letters, language, context, rhythm, mood, time, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques, fatigue.
• 03.28.07 Idle thoughts:

  Idle thoughts while at work. (This means: not enough material for a post in any of them alone. So I put them together on a tray and serve while other posts stew in the kitchen. How bloggy.)

  1. Have you ever actually heard anyone say that two plus two equals four in “the tone in which one says that two plus two equals four”? When I was taught it, it was an important fact to be studied and learned (so I heard it in tones of incantation, tones of authority, and tones of confusion).

  
  Tags: blog, reading, personality, work, boredom, thinking, research, music, throat-singing, overtones, mood, time, ambition, idle.
• 03.24.07 The nature of the beast:

  Having read the first two chapters of Tristes Tropiques, I can only say that I like how Levi-Strauss fleshes out his narrative…

  
  Tags: reading, personality, change, travel, detail, dialogue, composition, thinking, translation, research, ghost, letters, language, context, value, mood, time, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques.
• 01.23.07 Piling up:

  I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, setback, writing, project, composition, thinking, water, drained, simile, failure, rhythm.
• 01.02.07 Off on the right foot:

  Today I feel like my life is a series of setbacks and I pass the time in between them struggling to make up for lost ground. I took off from work today to fight a cold I felt approaching. Result: I feel worse, I spent an hour and a half walking outside in the rain, and I feel like if I see my office again I might have to scream. (I whimpered a couple times today thinking about it, but that was purely optional.)

  Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t feel like drawing the full-detail picture that would indicate its place in the larger pattern I seem to see. Partially because I’m sure I would be ashamed of the inadequate result. In any case, I would never finish it. The cruelest hit I took today was logging into google documents, I saw that I had nothing showing in my active documents: I haven’t touched a single one of my projects for a whole month. Hoping to shame myself into getting back to work, I had the idiotic idea of talking about one of them in a public place.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, shame, change, setback, travel, writing, project, siberia, turkey.