Values Stuff

      Types & Personalities

The one-size-fits-all tests

people put forward on facebook

and in school-counselling programmes

assert that they are capable of determining

an individual’s personality type,

and from there, well,

the sky must be the limit

to our understanding of ourselves,

finding our optimal life pathways,

and therefore, I suppose,

to transforming our situations

into ones in which we can be

happy.

Or something.

I myself am suspicious

of the whole fucking concept

of personality types –

as opposed to personalities –

as it seems to me that anything

more than a cursory, superficial consideration

of most people would reveal

that we have complex,

in some ways apparently contradictory,

multifaceted, multiple-type personalities.

Briggs Myers is rubbish,

like astrology and racism,

with its claim to be able to force

intricately carved pegs

into square, round, and other smooth-edged holes:

pigeonholing pigeonholing

typecasting typecasting

assigning assigning

regimenting regimenting …

        Biodiversity

I have a crisis of conscience,

agonising over the ethics involved,

on those rare occasions

when my cravings lead me

to buy one or two hundred grams

of supermarket beef.

The neighbourhood cats,

for whom I leave the fat and gristle scraps

by the end of the hedge,

have no such problem.

           The Common Touch

Do you know what it’s like

to be the different one?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to enjoy the weather

on cool, light-breeze days with high overcast cloud cover,

and to dislike it when it’s blue-dome, hot, and still –

to be a shade-worshipper?

to be someone who’s glad when summer ends

and it’s finally, truly autumn?

I do

and I have since I was a child.

Do you know what it’s like

to feel oppressed by daylight-savings time

without being a farmer?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to enjoy popular songs and TV shows?

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to follow cliché social conventions

and find it next to impossible to say, ‘Good, thanks’

when someone greets you with, ‘Howahyuh?’

Do you know what it’s like

to be unable to assimilate – anywhere?

to be an outsider, even in the company of outsiders?

Do you know what it’s like

to apply rational analysis

and a sense of aesthetics

automatically to even mundane domestic tasks?

Do you know what it’s like

never to be able to see the emperor’s new clothes?

Do you know what it’s like

for the way you look to be completely unlike the way you are,

and to be utterly unable to change either?

I do.

Do you?

   Comparison Gives No Comfort

I have a warm, dry house,

and my pension provides me

with enough to eat

and enough wine to distract me

at the end of each day

from my grinding, life-long unhappiness,

but that unhappiness is real, and permanent,

and I can do nothing to make it leave me.

Knowing that billions of others in the world

suffer much more than I do

does nothing at all to reduce my own despair.

It only makes me sadder.

                 Peeping Tomism

When I was five or six I read a comic book

– I think it was maybe a Donald Duck opus –

that had a peeping tom in it.

I accepted this, the way that little kids do,

as a matter of course, one more part of my

ever-expanding world to learn.

There was the term; there were the comic pictures –

peeping toms were clearly a thing.

From my little-kid point of view

it was definitely funny

– after all, it was in a comic book –

and it looked as if it might also be fun,

as I’ve always enjoyed a keen sense of curiosity.

It also, or so it seemed, involved a whole lot of sneaking,

and I’ve never liked sneaking,

and a big dose of in-the-shit if I got caught,

and, as I do today, I had an aversion

to finding myself in the shit,

and I’ve always been certain

that whatever it was, I’d get caught.

So I decided to not give peeping-tomism a go.

The same has applied, over the years,

to kneecapping.

                           Competition

When I was a child my mother often directed me to play

with my sibling, who is a month and a half shy

of being two years older than I am.

Being boys, the games had to be competitive.

Our age differential meant that I always lost,

and my sibling was a shit winner.

Every time he beat me at anything

he’d gloat and sneer and jeer and verbally put me down,

so I turned to private occupations –

writing, drawing, imagining, walking along the creek –

and avoided him, and competition, at playtime.

You’re unlikely to meet anyone less competitive than I am.

Later, when old enough for team sports,

I played for the fun of it and didn’t worry about the score,

and once when we were in high school

I had the enormous pleasure

of breaking his collarbone during a game of football –

one of the high points of my life.

Due to an odd set of circumstances,

I was a basketball coach at various levels

for a dozen years in the 80s and 90s.

I learnt to be a better-than-average technical coach,

but was never adept at the rah-rah stuff or handling difficult players.

I told my teams that if they played as well as they could

they’d never lose,

but better teams might beat them.

Like Woody Allen,

I find artistic competition distasteful,

and haven’t watched the Oscars on TV

since I was in my mid-teens.

You obviously won’t see this verse in any poetry competition.

                  Overwhelming

It seems to be particularly difficult,

and therefore somewhat rare,

for people who find ourselves

in agony-inducing life situations

coupled with the stress that coping with these has

on our emotional and psychological resources,

to recognise it when others are trying to find some way

to survive similar shit,

and to empathise with each other.

Overwhelmed people seem to have no time

for other overwhelmed people.

We each have our own problems, thank you.

                   Fear and Awareness

I used to be homophobic when I was much younger;

in the true meaning of phobic –

I was afraid of homosexual men,

afraid of being penetrated,

afraid of being shamed.

After all, it seemed that everybody I knew

felt free to express their detestation of faggots

at the drop of a hat,

so I avoided associating with them.

In retrospect I suppose it was just one aspect

– a culturally reinforced one –

of my fear of other people in general.

It was only after my gradual growth of awareness

of my own differentness and social and cultural isolation,

and the similarly gradual growth

of the number of my gay workmates

and other acquaintanceships,

and awareness of human sexuality in general,

that my fear of this category of otherness,

both different to mine and strangely similar,

faded away.

I’m still afraid of other people in general, though.

               Manners & Exceptions

I don’t believe in much,

but I believe in good manners.

I try to be polite and respectful,

and to avoid being rude to people,

unless they provoke me outrageously,

with in-my-face rudeness of their own.

One of the rudest expressions of bad manners

is to ignore someone,

at least face-to-face.

With facebook and other social media, though,

it’s often the wisest course to follow

to avoid a pointless conflict.

This should trouble me but it doesn’t.

For me, good manners also apply

to people only and not to abstractions,

even face-to-face.

I ignore death, for instance,

even though we’re face-to-face all the time,

because it doesn’t give a shit

if I’m rude to it or not,

so there’s no point in paying attention to it

just to be polite.

            I’ll Never Know

If things’d turned out differently,

I wonder if I would’ve become

a wanker who drinks the correct wine

out of the correct crystal stemware

with flawlessly correct companions

in a correctly custom-built show-home

located on a desirable beachfront section

in a prestigious seaside subdivision,

of if I would’ve managed

to avoid these temptations

and the smugness that goes along with them.