Birth and slow death of a nickname.

During orientation we took the requisite Myers Briggs personality index. Mine: ENTP. When I took this test last summer,I had the same type, but the shrink moved me into ENFP after speaking with me, go figure. Here is me quoting myself, from over a year ago on this very blog: we (my priest and I)talked about my frustration in talking with psychologists and others whereby my personality type, ENFP on the Myers-Briggs scale, was used repeatedly to explain all manners of my behavior. Now it is my experience, and reading of many mystcs, Christian, Zen, and Vedanta, that the personality is a shell, a narrow tube which we mediate experience through. A relationship with God has a way of transforming that narrow view. Spirituality is always a process of unlearning the narrowness that our conditioning and ourselves have set upon us. It is natural for us to want to pigeon hole each other, but I think, the test is ultimately a good tool, but only that.

Anyway, I noticed that my scale for extroversion was rather high, 26 on a scale of 30. What is the extrovert/introvert spectrum? It's how we process information. I agree that I process information in public, but I'm not convinced that I'm a classic extrovert. But that didn't stop me from publicly asking about my score, but I was sly you see:
Set up: The facilitator just got done telling us that lower scores (0-10)meant the person was more balanced, so I asked:
"I have this friend, who scored 26 on E, does that means he or she in unbalanced?"
"No, we would just say that 'your friend' (she did the air quotes)is a FLAMING E!"

And so, the nickname began. The funny thing is, the lady who really likes my nickname and loudly proclaims it, is the most loquacious, garralous, extrovert I've ever encountered. Thankfully, after a month, the name is dying down. But I am coming to terms with my extrovertedness, if only BSB can forgive me for opening our house to about thirty people tonight to study our service music. And since they are coming, we might as well feed them...