Sunday, April 19, 2009

Finding Yourself on Facebook

Pre-script: I'd really like to only include the first paragraph of this post, and then stick the rest "under the fold" as it's termed. How do you do that on blogspot? The idea is that there is a small link that says 'to read the rest,' and then this long, rambling nothing of a post doesn't push all the interesting Hyrum material off the page. Any ideas? Thanks. - DW
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I enjoy playing around with personality quizzes. They all have a tendency to say more than could be justified by their questions, but unless I think the result is absolute bunk or thoroughly unsubstantiated, I usually enjoy getting some nearly-always positive feedback about myself or hearing something completely off the wall.

The unsubstantiated:
"You are a perfect Mormon. There are only 4-5 of these in the whole world, so you must have been lying."
There were, what, FOUR questions to your survey? The only two I recall were how often I read my scriptures and what temperature I like my caffeine (aka how tolerant I am of other people's caffeine). That it?? I have yet to see an LDS survey that was worth baby drool. Maybe the market needs me....

The bunk:
I am the muppet Janice. She's in the band, Electrical Mayhem "oh yeah, with the yellow hair and bad makeup if I recall correctly," Joy identifies. For suuuuure. Laid back, everyone thinks I'm totally cool, nothing phases me, love being in groups.... Uhhhh, try again.

Off the wall:
Closely related to the bunk, I'm filling a giant pool with diet lemonade to reduce global warming when a raptor knocks me in and I drown. I may not survive raptors or lemonade, but I've got a 50/50 shot of surviving zombie attack. For a guy who only saw one zombie flick from the 70s (starring Charlton Heston as humanity's savior), not bad.

A little more informative:
Derrill completed the quiz "THE INNER NATIONALITY QUIZ: WHAT ARE YOU REALLY?" with the result You are Japanese. .
"You are good-natured and shy, interested in anything and everything that is exquisite, fine, detailed and highly cultivated. You put a lot of store in forms and formality, but that doesn't stop you from having a very poignant longing for ecstatic self-dissolution, which you sometimes achieve in groups, and sometimes through aesthetic appreciation on your own. You are much more comfortable behaving in public exactly like your peers, but when you are alone you pursue activities that are sometimes almost freakishly idiosyncratic. You make friends easily because of your gentility, but you will only be truly intimate with a very small group of them."

Well, let's say I'm more comfortable in public when others behave like me. I have yet to figure out how to act 'normal' without at least a feather boa, a pair of tweezers, two raw eggs, and a pinch of Crisco. It's nice of them to think I make friends easily. I'll give in on formality and private freakish idiosyncrasies, though.

Derrill completed the quiz "Which element are you?" with the result Air.
"Hey there, Air. How are you doing? In your default form you are by far the gentlest of the elements, the most altruistic of the elements, the easiest to be around. People who are close to you relish that closeness as if you were the oxygen they breathe. Though when you are such an honest and true individual sometimes it is easy for others to move through life as if you are invisible to them, pushing you around and hurting you in ways they would never imagine doing to say, water or fire. Little do they know that air can be pushed too far and all it takes is a few powerful gusts from this angry element to get a point across, though not without a rush of guilt and second thoughts to follow. Your place in the world: The genuine soul and emotional helper to those in need (A breathe of fresh air)."

The description is a bit ... overblown? But at least there are a few friends with whom I know I have fulfilled that role. Most accurate part: the guilt and second thoughts when I express my opinion a tad stronger than I meant to.

Derrill took the Which punctuation mark are you? quiz and the result is comma
"You are a comma. You like to spread yourself a little thin, trying to be all things to all people. A bit of a control freak, you try to do the work of 10 people. Relax! Let someone else shoulder some of the burden for once!"

Now this was undergrad Derrill for sure. It's nice to know he's still alive and well. The best part about this survey is that it's not trying to tell me everything about me. It focuses on one aspect and let's it go.

Not in Facebook land, I've learned that...
if I were a superhero, I'd be Spiderman (inner torment and nerdy)
if I were in Star Wars, I'd be Darth Vader (does not play well with others)
if I had a superpower, I'd have super speed (Joy agrees - highly efficiency oriented)
if I lived in the middle ages, I'd be a traveling troubador (entertainer, love of music and humor)
and in Imaginiff, some friends tell me that the body part that most resembles me is my mouth. ... ?? They explained it was because I led the music at church and sing so much. Ah.

And, by interesting coincidence, a website that examines your blog and tells you your Braxton-Hicks personality type says I'm the exact opposite that my usual B-H test tells me. There are two possibilities: either I'm presenting a false Derrill to you all, or else the blog is a way for me to express other parts of me. Given that my B-H test results give me a 60/40 split on every characteristic, I flatter myself that it's the latter.

What are some of your favorite silly personality quizzes?

1 comment:

Sapphire Sting said...

What's that last website? I'm curious now!