Meyers-Briggs, Toilet Paper, & Strawberry Jam

What to do when the established & respected authorities tell you who you are and you read the description and think: “no I am not”?  I was recently informed by the famous & irrefutable Meyers-Briggs Personality Type test that I am an  INTP (introverted-intuitive-thinking-perceiving)  personality type and thus belong to a group inhabited by only 1% of the general population.  I’m rare!  Special! Nearly unique!  That’s great, but so what? I just spent 20 minutes reading about who I am and it doesn’t add up.  Although, the fact that the last 2 letters, TP, do also stand for one of my very favorite things: toilet paper.  This fabulous invention was surely conjured by a person of great genius, undoubtably another INTP.  Simple in form, with 1,000,001 uses, toilet paper is truly one of greatest gifts ever given to humanity, but I digress.

In my research I found that INTPs are so rare that they apparently feel the need to have their own club  with their own website: www.INTP.org, sadly the site is broken.  Apparently the big thinking INTP theorists got bored with the mundane task of maintaining their own site.  It’s no surprise, after all, INTPs are “interested more in ideas than social interaction”.  According to the published “facts” we INTPs, hate jobs that lack creativity, loathe clear structures & responsibilities, and working as part of a team.  How could you expect these theoretical & skeptic geniuses to keep any group going for any longer than it took to think up the idea?  According to the books, we want jobs that offer “international opportunities” that allow us to pursue our favored leisure activities of “appreciating art & taking classes/going to school”.  We get bored quickly damn it, stop trying to chain us down with maintenance duties.

My Strawberry Sauce

What to do when  Jacque calls & says: “hey, do you want 12 pints of strawberries? Good, because I am on my way over”?   INTPs are very adaptable, we can drop the task of the day, laundry, to make strawberry jam in a minute flat!  Because we have more ideas than completed projects, we even have canning jars & fruit pectin in the pantry from the idea to do this same thing last year, but never got around to it.  We don’t read directions, why waste time with the obvious?  Afterall, how hard could this making strawberry jam thing really be.  I need to get this thing taken care of quickly, another “surgical strike”.  Who needs instructions?  Not me.  There is a list of ingredients…. mix  ’em up….. boil for 1 minute….  and voila, strawberry jam!!….. uh oh, hold on a minute,….. that is not strawberry jam….. that is…. uh….um… strawberry sauce!  And isn’t it delicious??  No one will ever know. Aren’t I the best-est little strawberry sauce maker in the whole wide world?

According to “REAL personality types made relevant”, I am an “egg head”  who can “construct a nuclear reactor from a coconut & 2 pieces of string”, but cannot “dress myself”.  Sheesh, and I was thinking that I was rocking my robe & slippers look.  He continues that : “The INTP is really only suited to two careers: college professor and game show contestant”.  Since I failed every 4th grade logic problem posed at a recent pottery class, I suppose I should start referring to myself as professor, must admit, it has a nice ring to it, professor.  But wait!  We are funny:  “INTPs are often the hit of the party.  The fact that they often show up with their pants on backwards and that if you put a Post-It note reading “Kick Me” on an INTP’s back, he won’t notice it no matter how many people kick him. That kind of entertainment never gets old”.

So another 2 hours spent researching the esoteric but interesting little bits of the WWW.  What did I learn?  Anything?  Well, for one thing, they need to add “a love of the over-use of commas” and ” a propensity for run-on sentences” to the INTP profile.

Cheers