The triad of the self

Be honest, how many of those time-wasting quizzes have you taken in the quest to pigeonhole yourself? How many of the conflicting answers sound more or less like you? Have you ever thought (or heard someone else exclaim) “I wish someone would just tell me who I am so I know what to DO with my life!”

Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos may be summed up as a satiric remark upon the failure of the self to grasp itself — you, the most intelligent being in the universe, don’t even know who you are concretely enough to answer the questions provided in the “quiz” format of his “self-help” book. Me, for example, I often wanted to respond “all of the above? None of the above? Wait… what was the question again?” Percy contends that there are frameworks within which the self can operate and find a place: philosophies, for example, of relationship and hierarchy (Judeo-Christian, Eastern) or of superiority (the scientist or artist who is above it all). To this I might add culture, because the way a Japanese underling sees himself in the world is different than how an American underling sees himself in the world. Indeed, this philosophic outlook within which one is raised (and ultimately modifies, but never quite escapes) seems to influence more of one’s life than anything else.

Personality isn’t something that Percy really gets into (at least so far; I’m about halfway through the book). In fact, in some of the examples he gives, you get the feeling that he almost thinks personality is a construct, mirrored from how the world perceives you. But I’m going to assume that there are certain leanings, quirks, shortcomings, traits and strengths innate within a person, and these even may be generalized into some sort of systematic personality “type.” This likely does not directly result from one’s upbringing or philosophy or culture, but it will probably be influenced by it. Certainly, how extreme these traits are and what one does with them will be influenced by one’s larger philosophy.

So, according to my own theory about how the self sets parameters to live within, overarching philosophy (religion, culture and so on) influences how traits (personality, preference) manifest themselves; both influence the choice of occupation. I mean occupation in the broad sense — not just your job or line of work, but your pastimes and the people you enjoy. Hence, despite a self that can be placed on a sliding scale from minus infinity to infinity (according to Percy), self still falls within a tidy parameter, defined in part by what one cannot reasonably be. One cannot reasonably be a Buddhist assassin, an Amish runner of illegal gold, a danger-averse Navy Seal, or a ballroom dancer with two left feet. And, oddly or not, when you describe yourself, you use the language of this triad: “I’m a relaxed, happy, Mormon mountain-biking enthusiast,” or “I’m a reserved Chinese woman in the grad department at State University, and I enjoy cooking.”

But this still assumes that one has consistent philosophies and traits. Assume, then, that your philosophy is an industrious Western project-oriented ideal: you see yourself as worth something when you are accomplishing something; you relate to the world through action. Your personality, for example, could be A. that of a self-motivated choleric, consistently driven, with a penchant for working with your hands, or B. inconsistent and unconnected, with bursts of extremism in every direction. Personality A will decide to be a carpenter, a manager, a construction worker; will have a standard schedule and probably want a standard day. He will be tempted to be a workaholic but may be saved through sheer exhaustion. Personality B will probably change jobs numerous times, get nothing linear accomplished (though many things done), and, when discouraged, will dislike himself and the world for it.

At this point things may start to reverse themselves. Something’s not right with the way I’m functioning; is it my job, my personality, my philosophy, or what? After changing jobs or hobbies enough times, the questions become more and more far-reaching. Can I change my personality? Can I change my philosophy? The answer, at least to some degree, is yes, at least if the change goes deep enough. If you change your philosophy, and truly believe this new way of relating to the world, the change filters over to your strengths and weaknesses and then/concurrently down to your lifestyle choices.

This is easier said than done, however, and it’s much more efficient in the short-term to just try some new novelty in the hope that this will explain/fix who you are.

When you have the power

When you’re in charge (or want to be) how do you carry the burden? Answer these questions as honestly as possible to find out. Answer not according to your ideal theory, but according to your actions, past and present. Ask yourself: what do I ultimately desire? What best sums up the past few years’ philosophies in these areas? What is your…

Philosophy of money:
A: holding sway over the finances because you make the bulk of the money
B: ensuring that all needs are met
C: … especially the needs of those who can’t make as much money
D: getting to give to get back: I look good and also get the money

Philosophy of control:
A: being able to control any situation
B: making decisions with everyone involved; not exerting more control than the situation calls for
C: turning the other cheek, literally if necessary
D: hmmm, which of these sounds the best?

Philosophy of the market/dating scene:
A: payment for output, preferably at a rate that gets the most bang for buck
B: fair exchange
C: charity, without partiality, hypocrisy or showmanship
D: obsequiousness and generosity will get me what I want

Philosophy when slighted:
A: strike when and where the opponent is weak
B: meet on a level playing field and come to an accord
C: give up the right to attack
D: get henchmen to do the dirty work

Philosophy of helping people:
A: an inconvenience if it’s for someone else; a right if it’s for me
B: good either way
C: always help others; don’t be angry if they don’t help me
D: always help others by helping myself

Philosophy of forgiveness:
A: never really forgive, even if I did the same thing or worse (it puts me in a vulnerable position).
B: forgive if you want to be forgiven (everyone’s in a vulnerable position)
C: forgive before they even ask (I make myself vulnerable)
D: swear all is forgiven (this will make the other vulnerable)

Results:
Mostly A: You want to wield power, usually at any cost. Relationship style: Tyrant. Suggested mottos: “might makes right,” “it is better to be feared than loved,” “look out for number one.”
Mostly B: You are about responsibility, which always involves logic and being fair. Relationship style: Democratic. Suggested mottos: “liberty, egality, fraternity,” “what goes around comes around,” “A therefore B.”
Mostly C: Chivalry and sacrifice run in your veins. Relationship style: Christ-like. Suggested mottos: “love your enemies,” “God save King Arthur.”
Mostly D: You are manipulative and highly concerned with how others perceive you. Relationship style: Politician. Suggested mottos: “that depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.”

The things you take for granted

Like walking up stairs, walking a few blocks, bending over to pick something up, sitting in chairs, rolling over in bed, getting in a car… all sadly agonizing when any part of your spinal column is injured.

If you’re going to have a spinal injury, I recommend choosing to injur your tailbone. A cracked coccyx seems to be a fairly common occurrence, so you’ll have lots of sympathy from people who cheerfully will inform you: “oh, how horrible; that will take months or years to heal.”

Meanwhile, I feel like an old woman, shuffling along with ache and drug cocktails for company. “Some of us were just made to be old,” someone said the other day. Not me; I don’t like having to worry about constipation and whether or not a place has handicap access.

It all started Saturday morning, at the top of Schweitzer mountain. Strapped to my sister’s slightly-too-large snowboard and boots, I quickly discovered that the quality of the snow was lacking, having melted and frozen for so long. It had been groomed, kicking up chunks of ice, and was otherwise too slick for my comfort. But… there was nothing to do but try to practice my skills and hope for the best. All it took was a few seconds of lost control as I tried to navigate my front edge to my back edge around a narrow curve, and bam, I was down, coccyx first, then head, flipping over to land on my stomach. I was highly frustrated with myself, especially when, having made the small remaining distance to Stella, I got out of my left binding and realized just how much it hurt to drag the board to stand in line. I hoped I could make it up the lift and take the cat track down to the lodge. After disembarking, however, everything started going fuzzy and spotty-black, and the migraine I’d been fighting for the past days reared its ugly head. I lay face-down in the snow to get the ringing out of my ears. Tried standing up again. Nope. Between the tailbone pain and my head, I was pretty sure I’d pass out or start vomiting before I ever got to the lodge. Fortunately, there was a ski patrol about three feet away, watching people get off the lift.

This ski patrol person, after observing my behavior, insisted on calling in a toboggan and backboard. “This is just protocol,” she said, fitting a neck brace around me as I lay covering my face with my hands to block out the sun. Several people (whom I never saw) rolled me onto this backboard, strapped me down with a pillow under my knees, put me in the sled, and covered me with a blue tarp. I couldn’t help wondering: what happens if I run out of oxygen/ the sled crashes? How do I get out?

Neither happened, however, and I jolted down the mountain and was carried into the first aid station, where a doctor pronounced me fit to leave after I assured him that it was just my tailbone that hurt, and the migraine was not a surprising occurrence.

I can still function, albeit at a fractional capacity. Only everyone seems to think this injury is funny.

I love spring, I hate spring

I suffer from migraines approximately once a year. Every single instance I can recall has been in the spring, on a sunny day, as the weather was getting nice. Last year, in about April, I just about blacked out at work and walked smack into the printer, which caused some consternation among my colleagues. In 2008, around the same time, I was migraine-prone for about a week. Actually, that year, there was an exception to the once-every-12-months rule: I got another migraine in November. However, it was after having traveled to Florida for a conference, en route to spring in South America.

In 2007, I got a migraine in May or so and had to get Imitrex from my brother, who suffers from them a tad a more frequently. In 2003, I got one just before spring term final’s week, in Oregon. In 1997, I got one after a first (chilly) tanning session in our back yard. In 1996, I nearly blacked out in Easter choir after softball practice. As a kid, I remember sleeping in the back of the car because we were going somewhere on a nice day and I got one.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I noticed the pattern. I had observed that it was more or less once a year (although not quite every year), but hadn’t put together that it was when the weather was getting warmer and the sun sprang to life once again. Diabolical! No wonder I hate tanning and such.

Today I started getting one again. Winter has been mild, and spring has come early. Great, but not so great for my head. Catching it early, I drank coffee and swallowed a tiny bit of Imitrex and went to bed with a black-out wrap around my eyes for a few hours, pushing out all stimulation for the lovely soft blankness of quiet sleep, and then made sure I was cold when I walked back to work with sunglasses on. So far it appears to be working.

It does seem odd that even with all the modern trappings of our existence, we can be thus at the mercy of the weather. Although I keep it safe from harmful rays and blizzards and spend the winter heated and the summer cooled, my body is more tied to the biorhythms of the earth than I give it credit for.

Invite one in

Spoiler alert: this movie has been out for a year and a half, so minor discussion of the plot seems tolerable.

Let the Right One In has been hailed as one of the smartest vampire movies ever. It has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes (as opposed to 50% for Twilight, for example). Critics see it as choppy, vague, amoral, with flat effect. But might a smart vampire movie not be just that? It plays by all the rules, and as a result, the vampire gains a lot of humanity.

The main character, Oskar, is a bullied loner with revenge fantasies living in a drab corner of Sweden in mid-winter. The bright spot in his life is the weird girl from next door, Eli, who is likewise drawn to him because she identifies with the savage way he’s stabbing a tree in the courtyard. Promising relationship, no?

Speaking of this at a much later point, Oskar defends himself, and you get the impression that he’d like to think he’s better than the girl: he “doesn’t kill people,” and wants to hurt only the bullies who have tormented him for so long. Eli counters: I do it to live. And she does, with a slightly conflicted detachment tied to the innocence of her tiny frame, managing, oddly, to be endearing in the process. She is a reserved, motherless child, with unkempt hair, and seems to feed off Oskar’s admiration as much as she feeds off the lifeblood of the townspeople.

The link between her need for (unconditional) love and her need to survive is so strong that it permeates the movie, but so subtle that it’s difficult to find reviews pointing it out. Eli is introduced as living with a strange older fellow, whom she refers to as her father, but who appears to be anything but. He goes hunting for her clad in a plastic parka, and asks, with a hint of jealousy, that she not hang out with Oskar; she responds by touching his face and not saying a word. Which is creepier, the creepy old guy with a thing for young vampires, or the young vampire who uses him up?

The subtlety lies in how sexless the whole thing is. If Eli and Oskar were a few years older, the entire feel of the movie would be thrown. But they’re 12. They relate as children relate, even when Eli takes off her soaking clothes and hides in Oskar’s bed. And Eli denies herself repeatedly so as not to hurt Oskar. She’s something of a heroine, even given the background gore and the hints that she has done this many times before to get her guardians and benefactors. In the final scene, Eli and Oskar depart together into the unknown, smiling, gleeful, all their past woes behind them for the few hours that Eli won’t have to eat someone else.

Their grand escape. Which is funny, because there’s an offhand snippet of the Hobbit in the movie, read to Oskar’s class, ending in “Bilbo had escaped.” Triumphant snap of the book. It isn’t clear from the few sentences present in the movie, but in this passage, Bilbo has just escaped being eaten, with the ring in his pocket; tragedy will befall him and his because of this, and the whole world will be endangered. But for the moment, all is well again, and Bilbo is thrilled with the magic he has discovered.

I can’t imagine an Americanized remake being that pointed, or that subtle.

Personality’s light touch

I’ve been on this personality kick, but something I haven’t really considered much is this: how do these different personality types fit into different cultures? Different microcultures? One person, for example, pointed out that although there are introverts and extroverts within his family, in the outside world, they would all be considered introverts. In a global setting, Americans are known to be individualistic, materialistic, enthusiastic. And while they have larger space bubbles than the Chinese, they may be less loath to violate the space bubble in the name of friendliness.

Here’s a question: would you tickle someone you barely knew to draw them out of their shell? Say, on the knee. I argue this is rude and invasive, which could be an individual perception and due to my personality. However, I doubt that’s all there is to it, because I can’t imagine this being remotely polite in any culture but the USA’s. The USA is driven by the appearance of a good time, and the abundance of this need may lead someone to force a laugh even from unwilling participants.

I had a fairly extensive argument about this that I did not win, mostly because any appeal I made to logic or the necessity of being inviting rather than invasive was met with: “Yes, but someone else might perceive that as inviting; you don’t, which is typical of your personality type.”

How do you argue with that? Simple: you go to the broader view, which is not tied to your personality type. Personality is all well and good, but it fits into the broader culture as well.

Take the British, the lovely, deadpan British. How uncouth would it be for you, a jovial young male, to give a new friend on the tube in London a cheerful, creeping squeeze on the knee? “I beg your pardon,” says the British friend “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Ha! Ha!” you say “You can’t be serious! You just cracked a smile!” And, encouraged by this perceived friendliness, you go in for another squeeze. Until you realize the knee isn’t there, because your new friend has exited without warning.

Or take the Japanese, who are so charmed with subtlety that the better the sake, the less taste it will have. You’re trying to get the new business associate to loosen up. That bland sake isn’t working so well, so you try your patent-pending knee squeeze.

Well, even you realize how bad of an idea this one is when he then delivers a careful speech about how flattered he is by your advances, but he cannot reciprocate because he is not gay.

Or take the French, even. The French! You’ve just spent four solid hours eating food, drinking wine, and yakking about politics. The girl on your right has been enthusiastically shooting your ideas down for the past hour, but rarely cracks a smile. You grin; nothing. Joke; nothing. Give her a poke. She tenses and looks at you sideways. So you pull out the big guns and tickle her knee.

“Excusez-moi,” she snaps out “J’en ai pas envie. Pas avec vous.”

“Envie de…?” you mumble, confused.

“Vous savez bien.”

“Non, non, je voulais juste vous dire un petit, vous savez, un petit bonjour. Vous avez l’aire de vous pas amuser.”

“Je m’amuse pas mal.”

You may write all of these failures off as personality differences, but there is something larger at work here. Don’t try this very extensively, or you may even get your head punched, in New York or Appalachia or Johannesburg or Berlin. Or you may just get slapped with an abuse suit.

Because personality is only the beginning. You’ve still got to localize who you are or risk being thought a jerk.

Right Subtlety

I have had several debates in the past few weeks about subtlety, in various forms. Generally speaking, I am a fan of subtlety. I think for the most part this has to do with my aversion to hypocrisy, which is usually associated with the more violent rhetoric, say, of Rush Limbaugh. Rush doesn’t leave a lot of room for error in himself. He’s so busy slapping ad homs and non sequitors on everyone on “the other side,” picking apart anything and everything even remotely wrong, that when he makes a factual statement in passing like “2008, that’s three years ago,” you tend to want to slam the radio off and never listen to another word. Just out of the principle of the thing.

You raise the bar that high, you gotta live up to it, G. Oh, you can’t? Gosh, wouldn’t that make you a tad bit reluctant to be that mean to everyone else?

Aversion to this type of rhetoric can produce vehicles like Beware the Believers, which garnered much debate as to whose side it was really on. Intelligent design? Couldn’t be; it was actually clever, and a touch on the crass side, which Christians would never stand for. Evolution? Couldn’t be; parse out the lyrics and the imagery.

It would be a stretch to call a rap video, even one mentioning Aristotle, “subtle.” But in its own way, in that it avoids the Limbaugh-esque vitriol present in the movie it was originally made for, it is subtle.

The cookie-cutter “Conservative Christian,” inasmuch as those exist, may have an aversion to this sort of subtlety (because it is neither damning nor pious enough), but even Jesus did this. He told parables. People didn’t get them. After hearing these parables, they debated whether or not he had a demon, actually.

And as Walker Percy has suggested in his explanation of good news from across the sea, “in these times everyone is an apostle of sorts, ringing doorbells and bidding his neighbor to believe this and do that. In such times, when everyone is saying ‘Come!’ when radio and television say nothing else but ‘Come!’ it may be that the best way to say ‘Come!’ is to remain silent. Sometimes silence itself is a ‘Come!'”

Ethics and the golden rule

I have a new theory: even those out to destroy have good reasons for doing what they do, precisely because “good” is often a matter of opinion, and situational ethics thrive best in complex situations. Lying, for example. People justify it all sorts of ways: if they tell the truth, someone else gets hurt. If they tell the truth, they get hurt. If they tell the truth, they don’t get to sufficiently hurt the person who hurt them.

Or perhaps it isn’t even “lying.” It could be “fishing,” an interrogation technique where you deliberately misdirect someone in order to force the truth out. It could be “suspension,” in which you mislead someone temporarily because the time is not ripe for the actual facts of the case. It could be “avoidance,” where you swear to the truth in such a way that the truth becomes obscured. It could be “predicting,” particularly if it relates to the future…. And predictions often fail, particularly if one’s memory is bad. It could just be a clear case of the ends justifying the (glorious) means, whatever those are.

This is one reason why, in every study of ethics there is, the golden rule stands out so brightly. One cannot operate in this way and act according to how one would wish to be treated oneself.

Personality conflicts

Being a fairly introspective person, I’ve always thought I had a pretty good grasp of myself, and given that myself is pragmatic, logical, imaginative, flexible, dependable and at least relatively articulate, I had a hard time understanding why I didn’t make perfect sense to everyone else.

Part of it may boil down to raw statistics. If you give any credence to the Myers-Briggs school of personality classification, which I have been looking into recently after testing myself again, I have an uncommon personality, particularly rare in females: Introverted/ iNtuitive/ Thinking/ Judging (INTJ). Maybe this helps explain why, as a fellow female INTJ comments, “I’d found the world of females so alien for so many years.”

These personality types, according to my research, “value intelligence, knowledge, and competence, and typically have high standards in these regards, which they continuously strive to fulfill. To a somewhat lesser extent, they have similar expectations of others… INTJs focus their energy on observing the world, and generating ideas and possibilities. Their mind constantly gathers information and makes associations about it. They are tremendously insightful and usually are very quick to understand new ideas. However, their primary interest is not understanding a concept, but rather applying that concept in a useful way. Unlike the INTP, they do not follow an idea as far as they possibly can, seeking only to understand it fully.”

I like ideas very much, but theoretical people may annoy me insomuch as they cannot take immediate action to apply their ideas to their own lives. It is easy for me to spot inconsistency in ideas and actions, or inconsistency between two ideas. I want the world to make sense. Hypocrisy does not make sense. So, for example, if you, as an introvert, dislike the fact that I, as an introvert, don’t sufficiently cater to your silence, I will look at you as if you are insane. Or if you do something to me that you would not want done to you, I will look at you as if you are insane. Or if you accuse me of accusing you, I will look at you like you are insane. Because, honestly? That is insane. Hypocrisy is amusing (such ripe fodder for satire) because at its core it’s anti-matter; a joke against itself.

This line of thinking, of course, has been described as arrogance or bitchiness on my part more than once: apparently it is arrogant to point out that the emperor has no clothes, even to defend the practice of not accepting fashion tips from him. But it generally isn’t arrogance so much as bewilderment. Conversely, I have also been described as too cold, which is consistent with this personality type, and which I also thought was unfair and inaccurate, since I care deeply about people, in general and in specific:

“At times, INTJs will seem cold, reserved, and unresponsive, while in fact they are almost hypersensitive to signals of rejection from those for whom they care. In social situations, INTJs may neglect to observe small rituals designed to put others at their ease. For example, INTJs may communicate that time is wasted if used for idle dialogue. In their interpersonal relationships, INTJs are usually better in a working situation than in recreational situations. They do not enjoy physical contact except with a chosen few.”

Odd; I am good at networking — charming, even, dare I say, though you may not believe me — if I’m getting paid for it, but can’t bring myself to do it otherwise. And physical contact is a weird game best avoided most of the time. Another thing on relating to the world: these people are described as possessing “an unusual independence of mind, freeing [them] from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.” This is not because they hate authority, convention or sentiment. It is because they go with what makes sense. If something doesn’t, it gets tossed out. On to plan B. Speaking of which, they are highly efficient and very good at contingency planning.

How very strange that I am thus described in terms of theory when so many, even some of those closest to me, have found my way so mysterious. And mysteriously mysterious to my mind, for I have always been honest with my likes and dislikes and my desire for sense.

As a child, I was reserved, but almost morbidly sensitive; creative, but consistent, and I was always willing to delay my own gratification. I was a good kid and generally far more mild-mannered than my siblings, but I had a stubborn streak and would not back down if I thought I was in the right, even for something as ridiculous as, at the age of 3, thinking I should be able to decide whether I would brush my teeth or not. I lost that one, but it took about ten spankings after ten scenes of defiance. I was 5 when I came to my first memorable systematic realization about the world: sitting on my father’s desk, it occurred to me that life is made up of choices between good and bad and all life required was to always do the good thing.

If someone touched me I had a tendency to flinch, although I was always planting affectionate kisses on the foreheads of my little brothers. I was logical and quickly found out what worked and what didn’t. I always took shortcuts in math. I would play games with myself where I would see if I could connect one thing to an unrelated thing. I became convinced that there were patterns everywhere, connections everywhere, and if I thought long enough about something I should be able to figure it out.

Even my appreciation of and approach to my current job fits into the classic INTJ description. I plan the content of a magazine; I approach each issue a bit loosely, drawing the loop of the end idea tighter until it comes together. I juggle ideas, words, format, grammar, ESL constraints, theme, space, graphics, personalities. I’m always contingency planning without even realizing that’s what I’m doing, and somehow I work less and am less stressed out than my predecessor, by all accounts. I don’t know if this would translate to a bigger publication or not; I like that my job is fairly laid-back, but I also like the times when it’s a bit more hectic, as long as the project is something interesting. I am known for efficiency elsewhere: being able to live on a shoestring, and for getting excellent grades with minimal study.

I want to nudge the world towards order, but if nobody’s around to appreciate dinner, I don’t make dinner. If nobody else cares that the house is a mess, I don’t care so much either. This is efficiency talking, not as some have said, a pure lack of motivation — if I have a reason, I will prepare things painstakingly, because I take pride in providing a thing of beauty to an appreciative eye. But I won’t make dinner merely because it’s tradition to sit down and eat a hot meal at 6 p.m. It might not even occur to me that this is possible in a reasonable world.

Interpersonally, if you say something to me, I expect that it is so. If you say you’re OK with something, I assume you won’t mind if I act on it, even if you tell me you’re OK with being hit in the face. I expect that what you promise will be so, unless you also say: if this happens, we will go with plan B. I am fine with unresolved situations, but I want to be able to plan for contingencies. I can’t do that if you say “A therefore A” and then unexpectedly go with N. I am laid-back normally and may spend a long time gathering data, but in the end I need a plan of action (or two or three). If you just don’t know, that’s fine. But I’ve got some ideas. Let’s get to a solution together as fast as possible so we don’t waste time in disharmony.

Habit-wise, I don’t smoke or drink much or consume much unhealthy food because, for the most part, it’s so inefficient. I don’t tan for the same reason. What an inefficient thing to do to your body, which you need your whole life. I’m not really that obsessive about health, though, and exercise only semi-regularly. When I do, I prefer sprints to distance running, road biking to somewhere to mountain biking to nowhere, and something like flow yoga or dancing to just about everything. In an hour, you can work on full-body strength, flexibility, coordination, balance and even a bit of cardio potentially. And you can relax. What could possibly be more efficient?

However, given my penchant for restraint, either paradoxically or correlationally, I am intoxicated by the pleasures of sense, of movement, of vision and music and touch and texture and the exotic. I am an ascetic aesthetic. The best memories of my life are not the wrangling of a problem, they involve the smell of the spiced air in the French Riviera, the slow spin of the Argentine tango, ice wine on the lips of a beloved, the best-savored meals, the best-savored sunsets, the sharpest mornings, the ache of being alive.

The funny thing is I tend to use the time gained by being efficient elsewhere by staring into space and thinking about the patterns of the world, which is not especially efficient. So perhaps my efficiency is borne primarily of laziness.

It’s true. I’m a phlegmatic more than a choleric and I want peace far more than I want control. But as most phlegmatics don’t act as much like cholerics as I do, people misunderstand me.

Free gifts

Typically, when you get a present it’s in celebration of some momentous event, something like the 25th of December and the pagan ritual-cum-Christian-holiday that has resulted. Typically, you’re handed a gift and you know exactly where it came from and exactly how much the person loves you based on the thought, time and salary percentage that went into the presentation and whatever it contains.

But sometimes you get something out of nowhere, and sometimes these things are even anonymous. And strangely, this, of all things in the world, seems more like a gift than the possible contract or bribe or expectation or reward that comes wrapped in silver paper bearing a name. The etiquette of gift-giving is always touchy; you can’t be stingy, but neither should you be so generous that the other feels guilty for not giving you as much back. You can give something secondhand if it’s an antique or otherwise a great find, but not if it came out of your closet.

The etiquette of gift-giving doesn’t seem to cover charity. And as much as “charity” is something of a dirty word, its roots are the opposite. “Charity” is often the translation of agape in the King James, an unconditional and baseless love presented without the possibility of requitement.

Sometimes an anonymous gift, one of those unexpected things you find when you open your mail, even with the flash of the maddening cultural implication that you just can’t cut it, is like this unconditional love.

It says: whoever I am, and I could be anyone, I think you are worth helping. I think you are worth loving. I think you are worth saving. And heck, I may be wrong. You may use this to buy ingredients for meth or something, and heck, I wouldn’t even know. I’m just going to trust you with this. With no other words to accompany the gift than encouragement, with no other sign than the block letters of the crowd.

In response, what does one do? Who does one thank? There is no one to claim recognition. So one turns outwards, one looks outwards, one looks for ways one may also be generous. Unconditionally. And even secretly. For one knows, now that this has come, that others may need this too.

And this is the law and the prophets.