A Test of My Personality

My Personality

Neuroticism	17
Extraversion	43
Openness to Experience	96
Agreeableness	57
Conscientiousness	22

You are a calm person who is considered almost fearless by some, however you don't usually get angry too easily but some things can annoy you. You are not prone to spells of energetic high spirits. You are a moderately imaginative person who enjoys a good balance between the real world and fantasy. You find helping other people genuinely rewarding and are generally willing to assist those who are in need. You find that doing things for others is a form of self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice, however you feel superior to those around you and sometimes tend to be seen as arrogant by other people. You have a strong sense of duty and obligation, and feel a moral obligation to do the right thing.

Take a Personality Test now or view the full Personality Report. PureAwakening Jewelry.

Of course tests like this are only as good as the nut case answering the questions!

So it's 11:11 and I can tell I'm giddier than a rattlesnake with a toothache.

I spent the working hours of tonight coaching a group of parents trying to find the magic button that will turn their teens into proper, respectful, God-fearing American citizens. It ain't happening, people, is what I want to tell them. I am probably older than every one of them so why am I having to say over and over again: don't you remember what it was like? don't you remember how you felt? Some of them do remember and they're the ones whose kids will probably end up okay--after some period of drugs, alcohol and illicit sex (don't you remember what it was like?). The kids I fear for are those whose parents refuse to remember, who have come to me to Fix The Kid--or else. I have little patience for these parents, which is not such a good thing affecting as it does my empathy, which is, as we all know, the bottom line of any good shrink. But then, I'm still just a shrink-intern, so maybe my patience will gather moss as I gather hours.

See, you can tell by the utter what-the-fuck-is-she-talking-about of that last sentence that I'm giddy.

Memory

I forget the things I know. Does that ever happen to you? The things I really need to keep in front of me, the realizations that are hard-won and long-coming, and I have them and know them and then--poof!--gone. Except that somewhere, hiding out under the back porch is the slightest sense that I'm missing something important, something that will make such a difference in how I see things and feel about things. Something that is crucial to my moving onward. But I don't know what it is. Or where to look to find it.

Like this: Everything Does Not Have To Become Something. Does that make any sense? Let me give you some background, then. I come from a family of strivers and doers and use-your-talents to-the-utmosters. In my family, if you could carry a tune, you took voice lessons and plotted your course as a singer. If you could draw, then obviously you'd become an artist. Have an idea? Get it patented; put it into action; create success around it; do; achieve. Even now, I can hear my mother and my aunts and my cousins scheming: Janie dear, you're so good at X, Y, and Z. You must become an Xer, a Yer, and a Zer. One couldn't simply have an idea that was "good"; it had to be actualized. One couldn't simply be; one had to become. I learned those lessons better than well, and it's now an automatic response for me to, as soon as I get a cool idea or an urge or a notion, figure out how to maximize it. Which is not only exhausting, but just plain wrong. It puts the emphasis on the product at the expense of the process even as it sets me up for failure.

I realized that a while ago, and immediately knew it was a crucial piece of information for me. And then I forgot it.

Did I forget it because it was so crucial? The urge to inadequacy is quite strong, and the mind has a way of getting its way.

Last night, I remembered it. And thought: I can't forget this again; it's too important. If only I did needlepoint, I could stitch it on a pillow. Instead, I'm writing it here.

Will I remember that I've done that?

G is for Garden...

This will not be a touchy feely post. I am not one of those souls who wanders 'round her garden being nurtured by the nurturing nature of things green and growing. For one, there are also things brown and gray and wiggly being nurtured. I once wrote an article about harvesting snails from one's garden. It was a how-to, written in the days when I took any writing gig that paid (okay, so those days have not ended). I researched the thing and as with my articles about things sexual, my readers benefited only from my research and not from my experience. So when I tell you that harvesting snails is no big deal as long as you put them in corn meal to eat and shit for some amount of time (which you can probably find out by googling, or I could dig up the article) before you actually eat the suckers. And I use that last word advisedly.

But back to my garden....self-analysis is a 24/7 thing with me, so over the years, I've learned this about myself via my garden.

1. I am a process person. I love the planning, the digging, the planting, the weeding. To actually harvest whatever, eh, not really. I no longer grow green beans because they get so big so fast that I could never keep up with them. One year I actually made green bean pesto, which was no small feat. And people ate it. Which just proves that garlic, basil, and a good olive oil will make a decent dish of any old thing.

2. I don't believe in watering. If those fuckers, whatever they are, can't grow on their own, they don't deserve to, is my motto. Consequently I have more and better and bigger tomatoes than anyone around. Because tomatoes don't like a lot of water. Which means they deserve to grow in my garden. Other vegetables, not so much, I confess. Like cucumbers. But chard--I once grew a magic potion of rainbow chard. Of course, at the time I didn't know what to do with it, so it just kinda bolted out in the ground, a blessing of red and yellow and green, until it became brown and moldy.

3. I am an organic gardener. Mainly because those chemicals scare me and I'm always sure I'll shoot them in my face--or in Molly's. So if there are pests in my garden, I take care of them naturally. I spray whiteflies with soapy water. I get whoever I can to pluck the tomato worms off the vines. I tried drowning snails in beer, but frankly, my heart broke for the poor unwitting snail, inching his way into that good smelling stuff, working so hard, covering so little ground in so long a time and then--splat, he falls into beer and can't swim and drowns and leaves all his poor snail children alone in the dark. The same with snails and salt. I couldn't bear to watch them writhe. Why not just crucify them? You'd only need one nail.

4. I love weeding. I may save this for W is for... because really, what I would reveal deserves its own post.

5. I rarely if ever sit in my garden. My excuse is that it's too hot, too cold, too wah wah wah, but really, I think it's a character issue. What I like about my garden is the making of it. It's the process, I tell you, not the product. My garden here in Elk Grove is beautiful. As well it should be since I paid Hugo some $10K (okay, that may be a bit high) to put it in. It's got a stone waterfall and a gazebo. Actually, the electronics on the waterfall have frozen, so this summer particularly it has threatened to be a little den of mosquito inequity. And the gazebo--well, it's not fastened down and on windy days, it walks. But the rest of the garden is gorgeous: rose bushes and Meyer lemons, peaches and sweet peas, and them there tomatoes that I mentioned above. And, oh, the grape vines. These were D's special request. I think he plucked one grape, and I got stuck with the rest. Typical. I cut them off the vine and thought I'd make wine, or jelly, but, eh! they ended up rotting. So now I've got huge vines and what the fuck am I supposed to do with them. I look at them and think--grape vine wreathes, esty--I should cut and twirl or twist them and then sell them. I should. I should. I should.

But I won't. Maybe I'll get Bob, who is the Fijian replacement for the Mexican Hugo, to cut them down. Maybe I will.

But probably I won't.

NaBloPoMo

C is for Clients

...and yes, that's what we actually call them. Or you, as the case may be. Unless we have the magic Doctor in front of our name when we might also call them (or you) patients. Often we just refer to them by time, as in "My ten o'clock." But never by diagnosis, since that is verboten, not to mention forbidden, by the rules of the various boards that license us.

...and yes, I'm seeing them again.

...and yes, I'm questioning myself again.

The clients that I thought I wanted to treat when I was in school--the poor, the needy, the really fucked-up--well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe when I insisted that the one kind of client I never wanted was the Middle Class Woman Who Whined, maybe anyone with an ounce of understanding about things psychodynamic could see that this was a huge case of countertransference. Which none of my instructors thought to mention to me.

Basically what it means is that I didn't want to treat myself. Or people like me. Who I seem to think are weak, sniveling people with weak, sniveling issues to deal with. Like wobbly self-esteem and shitty mates and tedious workplace traumas. No, I wanted the real thing: Bring me your psychotic, your medicated, your traumatized, personality-disordered huddled masses--and I will wave my torch of empathy and grant them instant calm, if not bliss.

Well, ha! And ha! again. The huddled masses--they are so incredibly complicated, not to mention relatively hopeless, and sometimes scarey. They live in neighborhoods that are alien, in houses that are so tiny and ramshackle as to be barely there. If they live in houses at all, because remember, my very first client was a schizophrenic homeless woman.

I loved her. Not literally, but all the parts of her that were middle class, and dealing with a overbearing mother. But not so much when she started getting into the groups of martyred soldiers who were following her down the street, beckoning to her from doorways, trying to entice her into a life of sin. I knew delusions when I heard them. But from a middle class woman? Was it possible--? Nah, it was just me, middle class me, having a major countertransference issue.

Countertransference is a good thing and a bad thing. It's part of what enables psychotherapy at all, but damn, I'd rather not have my shit forced in my face where I can't ignore it. But my choices, it seems, are either to face it--or find an excellent excuse when I don't want to be a therapist after all.

I Think I'm Feeling Better...

I don't know why, but I am. Last night I had a major dream in which many of the greatest disappointments in my life were revisited and revised. My ex-husband Hamish did not marry a woman named Megan, which was the name we were going to give to our first born. My mentor in the PhD program revealed that the reason I wasn't too popular among certain faculty was not that I was mouthy, but that my ideas were so incredibly advanced, they were in awe. I really did dream both these things.

I did not dream, but did realize in my early morning meditation (would Buddha say it counted if said meditation took place lying flat in bed and sometimes resulted in returning to sleep?) that my clothespin magnets, albeit "colorful" as my cousin said, are also emblematic of what ails me. Which is: the urge to keep the products of my creativity neat and controlled. Small. Within the lines. Showing no signs of the fucking chaos that reigns within.

I must somehow break out of myself. I'm just not sure how to effect it.

Back to School, Back to Business--Back to Me

I hate summer. Always have. It's hot, and I get sticky, and body parts that were never meant to be revealed must be, for sanity's sake, on show. When I was in college, my parents had a pool. An in-ground, azure blue beauty. This was in Pennsylvania. No one there had a pool, but my parents were kind of reverse snobs, I suppose. They didn't want to join a country club, they did want to swim, so they put in a pool. I spent most of the summers inside, with a book.

I tell you this because it suddenly--d'oh--occurred to me on Monday night that Labor Day was over. The summer was over. And though I didn't have a school to return to, I could stop mooning around acting as if the world owed me a living. So I poste haste made a To Do list and Tuesday morning, I Did. As I am, again, doing today.

Here's what I'm doing:

1. Writing. Something I call, for now, The Night My Brain Burst & Other Stories. I don't know where it will go or what it will be. I do know that the fear of starting something that doesn't have a form petrifies me. Which seems good enough reason to do it.

2. Focusing on myself, rather than other people who shall be nameless. Everytime I think a thought about the Nameless One, I substitute my own name and cogitate on that. As in, The Nameless One is playing games with this not calling business becomes I am playing games with this not calling business. True. I am. I don't want to be out there dangling at the end of an unanswered I Want. Better to pretend that I don't want. Yesterday I returned my cousin's call. We had a funny, loving conversation that went on for exactly the right amount of time. She was delighted that I called her back. Small steps...small steps....

3. Isn't 1 and 2 enough? You want 3, already. Okay, here's 3. That little girl with Molly in the photo? She's my granddaughter. I'm choking as I say it.

4. Do I really think that all of you thought I wasn't old enough to have a granddaughter? You should know that my fear--you don't have to tell me it's nuts--is that you'll say, Oh, my, can't be your friend anymore. Didn't realize you were that old. That much out of our league.

5. Trying to unpack and deal with the shit I have about age. Be prepared: you'll be hearing a lot more about it, because--just because I'm working at not hiding any more. A long time ago, someone said to me, "You talk a lot, but you don't say anything." Weeeelll, not exactly true, but close enough. I am a BS artist, I know. I can sling a phrase and wield a pen well enough to provide my self with cover. I'm trying to stop that.

Detritus, not Detrius

One of the final lessons my father gave me, when I saw him for what would be the last time and he was in a hospital bed, was that the word detritus is not pronounced det-tri-us. The emphasis is on the first syllable, which is a long e, as in weed, not a short e, as in eh, whatever. The second syllable is try, as in attempt, not tree as in the oaks and pines. And there's a t at the last syllable. De'-tri-tus. It annoyed him that I never pronounced it correctly, and my father annoyed was quite imposing, even when flat on his bed and at death's door.

It's a good thing that I now pronounce the word correctly, because this morning I have, once again, been dealing with the detritus of my father's life. I have before me just one of the credit card slips he saved: a gas purchase at Hong Ki Han's Arco station in Lomita, CA. He got 10.7 gallons, for which he paid $6.30.

Following Fussy's example, I have been throwing this stuff out. She is shredding her father's papers, but mine has been dead well over ten years, so I don't think there's a danger of identity theft. Is there? I've tried to be firm and analytic about what to save. But I have to save some of it, because I am, after all, my father's daughter.

So I've saved his Cabrillo Beach Museum docent's patch, because it reminds me of his frequent attempts to do the dance of the whales. I saved some index cards on which he wrote things. My father was an inveterate writer of notes and he was extemely frugal with paper. Some of the index cards have been cut in half, because then you get two for one. I've thrown the ones on which he wrote shopping lists and designed castings or created on paper one of his many bricalages out, but there's a couple where I think he may have been writing a poem. I saved the letters he wrote to my mom before I was born, but I didn't read them because she once told me not to and I am, as ever, a dutiful daughter.

This is what I'm doing today, slowly but surely winnowing down the detritus of my life....

On hubris, being chuffed, and my continued conflict with fear

All we have to fear is fear itself. I think ole Winnie said that. Or maybe Stalin. Or one of them guys who were ruling the world in the last century.

I beg to differ. Fear itself is a fearsome thing. It can roar up and bite you in the butt. It can scald your innards with poisonous gases. It can paralyze an otherwise relatively normal human being trying to go around her life.

To wit: I could go on ad nauseum and infinitum with these cunning rhetorical twists and turns, all to avoid telling you what I set out to say.

Which is: Yesterday I got an email via my Flickr account from a guy at a gallery in Georgia in which he said they are having a show next month on documentation and distortion, and he thought I should enter.

If I could breathe, I would say more--.

TO BE CONTINUED

Dream Interpretation 101

For the past several nights, I've had dreams in which food was an issue. Not the main issue, not the star of the A story line, but a B or C story line. The general scene is that I am whereever I am in the dream--last night I was in a line at a cafeteria, another night I was at a party--and there's a lot of food to be had. Food that I like, food that I've long wanted to try, food that looks tantalizingly, appetitizingly scrumptious. Mashed potatoes, real ones with butter and cream. Lobster claws and cassaroles of cassoulet. Devil's food cake with piles of marshmallowy icing. And those were just the dishes that I recognized.

When I woke up this morning, I started to wonder what was the meaning of all this food in my dreams. I didn't have to go very far to get an answer.

A table full of dishes that I like and want to try. A life full of activities that I like and want to try. Photography, drawing, knitting, collage, jewelry-making, blogging, fiction-writing...and that's just the arts end of my list.

Is this a problem?

Dreams are little whispers from our subconscious. When they repeat themselves, they become shouts. What should I be paying attention to?

Maybe the slight sense of being overwhelmed I feel at that dream table. If I'm to pick one thing to eat, what should it be?

I get that I need to pick something now. But does that mean I can't eventually eat it all?

The Knitting Diaries: the scarfed tucked coat

This came in the mail yesterday. It's the yarn I ordered from Elann that I posted about the other day. With it came the instructions, as promised, for the coat, which was designed by Helen Hamman. They're calling it "scarfed tucked coat" --lower-case and since Helen Hamman's logo is also lower case, I'm presuming that this is a typographical choice and the name of the garment is actually, The Scarfed Tucked Coat. But it may be that that's just Hamman's or elann's way of differentiating this particular coat from the unscarfed tucked one. Or the scarfed straight-line coat. (Now the letters are starting to shimmer and blur in front of me, and I'm wondering if scarfed is actually a word. And what it would mean to be scar fed, as in eating a new brand of--blech! stop it!)

I was most eager to see the instructions for knitting the coat. I know it will be a challenge. Just to take on a project of this size--a coat, for chrissake!--is major. But it never occured to me that I might not be up to it. And then I looked at the pattern: two pages, 8 pt. type, a schematic that is clear, but that reveals the truth of what the explanatory blurb said: "This unique, asymmetrical coat features right front pleats and a long scarf, which drapes dramatically over the left shoulder. It is worked from side to side, with its body shaped by short rows."

Oy. In an instant I went from excitement to fear, from certainty of success to sure failure. In my mind's eye, I saw myself happily knitting the gauge swatch and then I saw myself shoving it and whatever else I'd completed on the coat into the back of my closet (with the other failed projects). That quick. Soup to Nuts--joy-excitement-interest-terror-failure-denial.

It seems to me that I may be on to some signal piece of self-knowledge here. If I can catch what I'm feeling and doing as I do it, it will be a way of isolating my process so that I can understand what happens when I get scared. And maybe alter the process mid-stream so that it doesn't end up in failure. So I'm going to do a diary of making this coat. Not posting about it every day, but when there is actually something to say. Maybe you all will help me figure myself out....

On the First Day of Christmas....

...oh, wrong holiday.

I've just gone through the last three years of New Year's Day posts and they're less than scintillating. 2004--nothing; 2005--photo of my nephew and cousin; 2006--ah, this was the year I came into my own as a blogger. On January 1, 2006, I offered photos of the goose I cooked at Christmas (to be known forever more as either The CSI Goose, or The Only Goose I Will Have Ever Cooked); a little tidbit about the Rose Bowl, and a link to something about Camilla and Charles' wedding in which I made a prediction. I cannot be more specific about these last two, as I'm just not interested enough to reread them. Was I then? Or did I think that such links were what would make a Real Blogger of me? I suspect the latter.

I have no resolutions because I make them at Rosh Hashanah. And break them at Yom Kippur.

I am now in my seventh decade. Doesn't that just scare the fucking shit out of you (she says mostly to herself)? Particularly those of you who have resolved to quit swearing (yes, you over there with the Red Stapler). I would like to tell you that living all these years has made me a wiser woman, but--t'ain't so, McGee (that, I believe, is a cultural reference to a radio program from the 30s or 40s--I picked it up from my mother, who would be 98 this year).

The fact is that you are who you are no matter your age. It's kind of like that adage: you take yourself with you wherever you go. I don't know that stuff gets better; maybe you just don't care as much. Some days I accept who and what I am; some days I want a do-over.

I can remember looking at a photograph of my mother when she was a young woman and being amazed at how beautiful she once was. Didn't she mind, I wondered, getting old. When she looked at herself in the mirror now decades later, didn't she care terribly that she no longer looked the same? I think I asked her, as well as I could without coming out and saying, "Don't you just hate that you're no longer pretty and young?" To me, at that time, aging was a tragedy.

From this side of the mountain, however, it's not. Oh, I am not thrilled with age spots (for which Esoterica does nothing) or crepey skin or errant facial hair. But they don't define me. Somehow I have always had friends who were much younger than I (is this a sign of immaturity, that I play better with the little kids?), and I'm coming to realize that the age difference is more of an issue for me than it is for them. What is it that I'm nervous about?

Okay, here's the tell all. I'm scared of looking like a fool. I'm scared of being one of those old women who dresses like a kid. I'm scared of people saying about me, "why doesn't she act her age...find friends of her own...stop bothering us...stop thinking she has anything in common with us..."

Here's something I wrote, a poem I guess, dated August 20, 1973. I can tell from the paper I wrote it on that I was sitting in the Newsroom at the BBC. Make of that what you will:

To retain my cool at
any cost,
That is my heart's
desire.

For my biggest fear
in this whole wide world,
Is looking like a fool.

Thirty-four years later, what has changed? My biggest fear now, I'd have to say, is how much that little ditty still governs my life. How much I have sacrificed to not looking like a fool.

I think there may be a resolution in there somewhere, but as I said--I don't do them this time of year.

Winge-ing, Whine-ing Blog Posts

I started to write this yesterday, when all I could do was winge and whine. Today I'm better, so maybe I'll write about it.

I hate myself when I get all drooly, drippy, moany on paper. I have kept journals for most of my adult life and they are, in the main, a partial record of my depressions, bad moods, story ideas, and rage at who- or what-ever. I still have most of them, scattered here and there, in leather-backed books (when it seemed like posterity might beckon), three-ring binders, legal tablets, school notebooks, and loose, just floating around scraps of paper.

I say they're a partial record because I've never made it through an entire year. In fact, safe to say, I never made it much past February or March. The weight of all that angst would get to me after a while and I would have to abandon my intention to document my life, moment by moment, as it happened. Sometimes I was frugal (or lazy or damning posterity) and continued from one year to the next in the same book. Like this one, first dated January 3, 1972; last entry November 20, 1979. It goes from the London to the LA-I years; from married to not-married; from bravely unhappy to unhappily brave. Winge-ing and Whine-ing, but whistling a happy tune.

It might be interesting to go through them all and see what, say, January 7th brought me from year to year. Might be interesting; might be boring; might be incredibly depressing, I suspect, to see how little my inner life has changed. Oooops, there I am drifting down into a winge.

Because I hate how I sound in this state, I don't often post in my blog when I'm down. I know there are whole blogs devoted to depression and that they're seen by readers as being incredibly helpful. I dunno. I'll tell you all about it person-to-person, but in a public forum, the best you'll get is my dancing around the subject. Which is what I'm doing here, obviously. Pirouette, plie, grande jete, pas de chat....

I don't even have a label for depression. And that, suddenly, strikes me as dishonest. So here I am, ripping off the costume, shedding the mask, dropping the pose. I'm depressed, bummed, pissed off at my life. There, I said it. And now I want to get off the stage as fast as I can...

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby....

Two years ago today, I started By Jane on Live Journal. Here's my first post,
in which I expressed the rather mild, nay, weak intention that my blog be a place where my friends and family could go to keep up with my life. Ha! And Double Ha! They refused, outright, sometimes silently and sometimes testily. The only family member who regularly reads my blog is Ratphooey, to whom I am eternally grateful, not the least because if I suddenly conk out at my computer, at least she will be able to tell the rest of the family.

The first year, I was trying to figure out what I was doing here. As I said in my LJ profile

You can also read there my stuttering starts at finding a voice for this blog. I always taught my students that good writing is draped on a rhetorical frame. Thus, knowing your purpose is paramount to effective communication. What I have struggled with over these months is what my purpose is here. In other words, what the fuck am I, a woman of a certain age, doing writing a blog that is read by few people, some related to me, all much much much younger than I am. My own generation, being those who cannot set their VCRs, are blog-challenged and even threatened. So I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here, but I'll keep on doing it--because I want to.

I just went back over last year's posts, and it's fascinating to see my voice develop (not to mention my confidence) . I no longer feel like the wizened old lady of the group, and I know what the fuck I'm doing here. Over the year, I learned that I am, above all, a writer, and this is the place that I write.

I had intended to mark this day by introducing some new features, like Book Club, in which I'll just blather on, as is my wont, about what I'm reading and what I think about it. And What's Cooking, in which I'll post recipes that I've tried or created. And Office Hours, in which I'll talk about things of a therapy nature. I'm going to try to make these regular posts. And if you have any suggestions for them, please let me know.

So, happy, happy birthday to By Jane--may she live a hundred years and drink a hundred beers...