My new favorite idiom: "as cool as the other side of the pillow."

It's a rite of passage in apartment life to deal with direct views into other people's windows, and their views into yours. I've mostly bypassed this so far, being on the inside bottom of the 'U' in my dad's building, and on the outside of the 'U' in college, with no other buildings nearby. But now I'm directly opposite a small 'U' in the adjacent building, giving me an excellent view at about 25 feet into the kitchens of 4 different apartments, as it happens. The resident of one of these apartments seems to do the same thing every evening from approximately 9pm-2am. He sits in his kitchen, and looks in my general direction. His window is half a story above mine so usually I can just see his head. It's quite strange; he doesn't appear to be staring at me, and yet he clearly isn't putting in any special effort not to do so. Unless he has a TV right next to his window, I can't figure out what he might be doing. Occasionally he is seen to talk on the phone, but otherwise he mostly just sits there. He is an enigma, a study in modern boredom. Sometimes his apparent unwavering stare makes me rather uncomfortable, in a Sartrian way. He is always watching, always judging. When I was constructing my studio (yes, I will get around to writing about that some time) I delighted in imagining my neighbors wondering why I was hanging from my ceiling with a dust mask on my face and a drill in my hand for half the night. But now he can see the relatively dull routine I've returned to.

The other day I was practicing loudly and perhaps ludibriously for a performance when I saw him come to his window, presumably to see what the racket was about. I immediately stopped playing and cowered in the small part of the room not visible to him, and then after waiting a bit, furtively closed the big panel that slides over my window to seal it. Perish the thought of him (be)rating me, then resuming the stare. Times like that, I am glad for my big heavy panel that shuts out the world.

A while ago I read a technique for achieving something--hallucinating, meditating, lucid dreams, some crap like that. It was to slowly count backward from 100 while imagining oneself falling through the air. I think the book cautioned against using this just to fall asleep, but for me that was about all it did. Lately I've had increasingly frequent nights of lying awake for hours with every conceivable thought racing through my head, which surpisingly enough can really drive you insane after a while. I tried concentrating on my breathing, but the fact is breathing just isn't enough to concentrate on, at least not for me. There are pauses between breaths, and in those moments other thoughts deviously sneak in. I also had a tendency to breathe very deeply, causing my heart to start pounding, which is not at all conducive to sleep. The counting technique must have gotten into that stream of thoughts because I decided to give it another try. I decided this time on a policy of one number per breath, as it otherwise becomes distracting trying to maintain a consistent pace. After one night I also dispensed with the "falling" stuff, because it's just silly and unnecessary. I always ended up just counting, and then every few numbers, saying to myself "oh right, and I'm falling too! fall fall fall...count count cou-fall! count..." and so on.

Some interesting things happen while doing this. Thoughts still sneak in, but in this relatively controlled environment, in which they are purely unintentional and not part of any real or useful train, it's possible to almost watch them pop up and then wonder about why they occurred. Since all I'm supposed to be thinking about is breathing and counting, must all these thoughts have some connection to one of those that causes them to come about? Some of them are as strange and sudden as dreams, and seem like they couldn't be anything but random synapse firings that come together in some bizarre way and then fade out. An example would be great here but so far I've never remembered any of them long enough to document them without disturbing the process.

Another phenomenon I've observed is that I seem to lose feeling in parts of my body, but not in the manner of true numbness, with the tingling and all. For example, I realize that I can no longer tell whether my mouth is closed, or my feet are touching. This always happens at a moment in the process when I achieve a profound stillness, in contrast to my usual tossing and turning, that only seems possible when distracting myself from physical sensations through some technique like this. Sometimes I'll give in and move a bit to instantly get the feeling back, and when I do this, I suddenly feel as though before I had been trying to feel it in the wrong place (if that makes any sense).

What one usually realizes after doing anything like this for a while is that it isn't so much this technique that works so well, it's just something new, anything different, and it wears out after a while. Tossing and turning is the same effect on a smaller time scale. The first few nights I fell asleep either before finishing the count or just about at its end (I could never remember whether I had stopped at 1 or 0). After that I had one night when I failed to fall asleep after completing the count. That prompted me to try another procedure, in which I count back and forth from 10 to 100 in increments of 10, just going on and on until I conk out. (Don't ask me why the 10's and 100 rather than 1's and 10, I think it's just a good feeling to reach 100 for some reason, probably all those years of schooling). The infinity is nice, since I don't have to worry about what I'm going to do when I finish, but it also seems to bring me closer to a point where I'm giving myself a virtual lobotomy just to avoid the insanity of overwhelming thought.

An interesting error in an essay called "Blade Runner Brilliance," with the amusing subtitle of "As 60 leading scientists attest, the movie is more relevant and important today than ever":

"To complicate things, the differences between humans and replicants are so minute that a sophisticated procedure called the Voight-Kampf [sic] test is required to flesh out the latter."

Presumably the author meant flush out, but all the talk about humans and replicants put the word "flesh" in his mind instead. Despite my recent near-religious commitment to reading Language Log I can't decide whether this is an eggcorn or a simple malapropism that happened to be motivated by the topic under discussion. By indicating that it may be a common confusion, I think this page contributes to the eggcorn argument.

Yesterday for no good reason I started thinking about the words we use to indigitate (call, indicate by name) servings of food. The first thing I thought about was the fact that we say 'a slice of pizza,' identifying the serving by the way it generally has been separated from a whole, in this case the pie. So of course I then set out to catalogue and categorize the methods of identification for different kinds of consumables. Just so we're clear, I'm talking about words we use to say "a ____ of [consumable]," excluding the containers they're packaged in and fancy restaurant dish names that specify more than just the nature of the main item in the dish. And so:

Method of Separation From Whole:

Slice - of pizza, pie, cake, bread, watermelon, other fruits
Cut - of (usually red) meat

Of course there are plenty of abstract uses of slice. Some quick lexographic googling shows you can also have a slice not only of life, but also of heaven, being, philosophy, infinity, romance, and Bisbee, Arizona. Mmm...Bisbee. Actually it's impressive how much these uses dominate the google results for "slice of."

Type of Container Served In:

Bowl - of soup, salad, cereal, cherries, pasta, ice cream
Plate - of about anything that is served on a plate, but generally less common with specifics
Cup/Glass/Snifter/etc - of coffee, water, juice, wine, etc.
Bottle - mostly of water or alcoholic beverages, and milk in the olden days
(also Terrine, and other fancy kinds of dishes)

Shape or Part of Whole:

Wedge - of lemon or lime, cheese, melon, lettuce, cake
Scoop - of ice cream

Part of Body:

Leg - of lamb
(Of course there are the many parts of chickens eaten, but I don't think I've ever heard "leg/wing/breast of chicken" rather than "chicken leg/wing/breast")

I feel like a 'shot' of liquor deserves some special mention, because it's not exactly clear what it refers to. Intuitively it seems it might be the method by which one is supposed to consume it, but the OED makes no specific mention of this, and calls it a dram of liquor, which is actually an eighth of our shot. Probably this could go in another category called "real units of measure" or something, which could also include Pint of beer.

There are also some interesting cases where we rarely mention a unit. Dessert beverages: one never has a glass of milkshake, it simply is a milkshake. I almost never say I'm having either a can or bottle of soda, unless I'm ordering one from behind the counter in certain food establishments and have to specify which one I want.

So naturally these were my best guesses at classification, and I encourage others to fill the gaps.

Several days ago I got into a debate with JV over the validity of the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator. In fact our debate was more over the countless web manifestations of it, most or all of which are of questionable quality and relation to the original test. JV had presented me with one of these and his own opinion of which type I was. The home of this version, which claims to be well-researched and not just another novelty, is here:

Myers-Briggs according to Craig

My problem with all the web personality tests, and I don't think this can be seriously disputed, is that they are for novelty purposes and unscientific. They seek a reaction of serendipity when, after answering some seemingly innocuous questions, you receive a block of text that describes you with incredible accuracy. It's as if the test understands you! The effect is produced by two methods. One is that of course the questions partly feed into the answers, but they are disguised well enough that you don't notice. The other is that the type description that you see at the end is written in a certain style, the same style used by astrologers and psychics and such. This style has been well-documented by skeptics. It's done primarily by telling people what they would like to believe about themselves. The rest is taken care of by our inherent suggestibility and resulting willingness to fill in the blanks, and remember the accurate parts while forgetting the less accurate parts.

A related aspect of the descriptions of the different types at the above site that bothers me is the feel-good nature of them. The one JV pointed me to for myself (Ok, it was INTP) was quite long and went on and on about what my type would do in different situations and how they would handle different parts of life. I had to admit to JV that plenty of things in the description seemed accurate to me. But it was also all very positive--telling me how smart I am, what a good memory I have, and so on. How can I disagree? About the worst thing in there is that I might "become [an] intellectual diletante as a result of [my] need to amass ideas, principles, or understanding behavior." Yes, you see, I'm just too dedicated, it's a terrible strain, really. The more I thought about it, the more equivocations I found in the description. Take this nugget for example: "They are very adaptable until one of their principles is violated. Then INTPs are not adaptable at all!" Yep, that's me...and most other people (or at least we'd like to think so).

I started reading some of the other type descriptions to get a feeling for how much more accurate my text was than theirs. But there was so much of it, and it was so exhausting to read, that it was hard to get a sense of the big picture. I did however find some more rather flexible sentences, such as these: "ENTPs have little patience with those they consider wrongheaded or unintelligent, and show little restraint in demonstrating this. However, they do tend to be extremely genial, and quite charming, when not being harassed by life in general." Does that describe you? Personally I'm the opposite! I love those wrongheaded people, but when life stops harassing me, watch out.

Then there's the obligatory list of famous people of this type, all of them great guys like Socrates, U.S. Presidents, and uh...the Olsen twins. Now it's one thing not to say that any of the types are the "jerk" type or the "homicidal maniac" type, that's defensible. But surely the more infamous historical figures do have types like the rest of us. I don't see the harm in including them. (I'll leave aside the question of how exactly it was determined that Socrates was an INTP.)

Now, all of this is indeed a separate issue from the validity of Myers-Briggs itself. As it happens, a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that I saw shortly after this argument addressed just that subject. He brings up this tasty statistic: "according to some studies, more than half of those who take the test a second time end up with a different score than when they took it the first time." The reason is twofold: first, our personality characteristics fall on a continuum rather than neatly in one category or another, so someone on the borderline gets simplified down and the result may not be reliable. Second, "personality is contingent, not stable, how we answer is affected by which circumstances are foremost in our minds when we take the test."

The other problem he brings up is that no one can determine objectively that the four axes used in the test are the four ways to talk about someone's personality. Anyone can come up with their own set of types, and there's no proof that one set is better than another, except that people's types come out the way you generally expect them to, which kind of tells you that you didn't need a fancy test in the first place.

To clear up one common misconception that I was glad to find out about from the New Yorker piece, the official test was not developed by doctors or professional psychologists. It was invented by a housewife (not that there's anything wrong with that) named Katharine Briggs who sought to understand the strange personality of her daughter's boyfriend, Clarence Myers. She started reading psychology books and came upon the theories of Carl Jung, which she then adapted into the test and the types. Jung never endorsed the idea that each individual was one type or another for life, and called the test a childish parlor game.

I went to the test's official site to try to determine how embellished or altered the type descriptions from that other site were. The only descriptions I found here were very short ones that basically regurgitated the names of the types.

The heart of JV's side in our debate was that he simply found the theory to be useful. Is it? I don't think it should be used as some shortcut to understanding others, as seems to be one major selling point. The fact that lots of big companies pay to have their employees take it doesn't convince me at all; big companies will do anything to feel like their decisions are somehow validated by an authority, preferably the same one all the other companies are using. It seems doubtful to me that it could be terribly reliable in determining who will do better in different business positions, as that's a whole other logical leap beyond what's in the types themselves. But, as with most all other pseudoscience, it's very difficult to convince people who believe that, despite what I might say, it is benefiting them in their lives. And sometimes (but not always) I think it's better not to try.

I remain convinced that Jung and the countless novelty websites have seen the test for its true (if not most profitable) nature: a parlor game.