My point in bringing up the M-B (which upon re-reading I don’t think I made clearly enough), which is and always has been very appealing despite its spotty authority, was how its wholesale buy-in to essentialist notions of rational vs. emotional thinking reflects again how popular and ingrained this thinking is.

My interest here is in finding a place & path for myself in this life. If the personality types are so much more fluid than I have been told, then do you have suggestions for how I could reflexively choose what to do?

(I say reflexively because my approach to date has been trying everything that looks interesting. I seem to have to try out every option in order to learn what it’s about–I’m not so good at picturing social interactions from other viewpoints.)

This is one of the things that’s always personally annoyed me about the Myers-Briggs test (which is a useless test that doesn’t predict anything with any validity but *still* gets used all the time). I’ve taken that test half a dozen or more times, and never with the same outcome. I either get the INTJ, INFJ, ISFJ, or ISTJ. Introverted and judging are consistent (well, yeah), but the sensing/intuition and thinking/feeling are totally interchangeable. Well, that’s because the test dichotimize between rational (sensing and thinking) and emotional (intuition and feeling), but is designed as forced-choice. I end up picking randomly between “rational” and “emotional”, because I can’t imagine one dominating the other for most of the pairs.

My rational decisions would be irrational to me if I didn’t take my emotions into account. Everybody has emotions. They’re useful and powerful, but in our society they are treated as second-class to rationality (and, surprise surprise, women get all the second-class adjectives). I LIKE being emotional, though I wish it wasn’t frowned upon or treated as evidence of mental immaturity. I also hellaciously enjoy being RATIONAL. And I’m sick of media/etc. suggesting that there’s a honest and brain-deep dichotomy between the two.

I watched it, I’ll admit, and a little bit of me died with every “If he’s not…” Ugh. Like Ashley said…Amen sista!!

And Ash..I’ll join that revolution with you.

can we also start the “i don’t have to wear high heels,socks, make up, smell like a bottle of chemicals, wear heavy metal in my armpits, have hair that looks good in the humidity, or wear something from the gap just to be accepted in business/politics/magazine” revolution?