INTJ

Never been willing to pay the $12 for my profile from the Myers-Briggs organization itself so I've subjected myself to the free versions which always calculate to INTJ, with the J near the border but the others solid in their determination.  It's a pretty good summary.  And it makes me fairly unique, falling withing about 2% of test takers, if not 2% of people.  Characteristics have always been there.  I prefer working and studying by myself.  As a medical consultant, I am thorough and I am independent.  I like doing hospital consultations where there are specific problems at hand to be solved than office work where solutions are often more nuanced and control over what the patient will actually do far more uncertain.  Should INTJ's be doctors at all?  We seem to come more on the list of science and legal occupations than medical ones, but some specialties like endocrinology are highly dependent on collecting data and solving a problem.

I am not on any committees, haven't been for some time.  I don't like committees where people have no real expertise.  I've been a little critical of my high school reunion committee for not thinking it important enough to use the available resources to find everyone but important enough to include an optional golf outing and deep sea fishing excursion.  That's not how INTJ's reason.  Being critical of anyone and anything might be.

Of course, in all likelihood I have had an INTJ underpinning irrespective of anyone, including myself, realized that.  Most important adaptations come naturally:  failed team participation, gratifying time with myself in any number of libraries, making fairly ornate dinners with little help, generally regarding our current President as a pendejo but not really all that opposed to enacting something I think is stupid to see if it really is as inane as my intellect would predict.  If anything INTJ's include the right to be dumber than them among the inalienable rights. 

There aren't all that many of us, but we seem to be pretty satisfied people when given the chance to excel.

Might Go, Might Not

Class of '69, first graduating class from my high school.  Fifty years approaching and undoubtedly cause for acknowledgment if not celebration.  We are highly accomplished.  I know that not so much by newspaper clippings as by a mixture of prior contacts, a small amount of keeping in touch, and a large amount of Facebook where many of us reconvened about eight years ago and largely plateaued, though I did add my first new HS acquaintance in a while not too long ago. 

For me HS was my fate.  I did not choose it.  My parents purchased a house and people who ran the school district apportioned which street's residents went to which school.  I liked the people and the teachers, clearly derived benefit from having been there, and it enabled my destiny.  Most of the ensuing half century proved more destiny than fate, choices about college, career, marriage, family, social and religious affiliations, political leanings, where to donate a portion of my treasure and how much.  Fate never quite stopped, though.  I had my physical composition, my INTJ Myers-Briggs assessment, those calls from the Dean of Discipline who programmed his office phone to speed-dial my office.  But for the most part my decisions directed my future, which turned out rather well overall.  That nebish from HS could direct his intellect and ambition in a purposeful way.

That did not happen for everyone.  Some I might say peaked fifty years ago, never separated, and plodding along not that differently from Arthur Miller's Bif who coulda been somebody had not somebody in high school done him wrong.  Death of a Salesman was a mandatory title in part so we would not have the same outcome as Bif.

Most do not live in the county of our youth, abandoned long ago for college or career or to escape the Hasidim who moved in.  But for a lot, those were their peak years.  For me my best times have usually been best defined as Right Now. 

People put together a lot of effort for a celebration.  With two months to party time, I need to make a decision.  I'm not indifferent.  I am ambivalent.