Visited my parents; Harvey Putter; Using Personality Type Systems to Create Fictional Characters

10:10 AM 12/6/10

I just got back from visiting West Virginia last night. My Harvey Putter video was in the mailbox. So I watched that last night along with the second disk that showed how the movie was made.

My dad didn't seem as old while I was visiting him and Mom in WV. We didn't do much of anything. As always, there was nothing to eat, and I didn't ask her to make any special dinners, so we had things like tacos one night, and hamburgers the next night. But we grilled the hamburgers out on the front porch while the snow was falling, and I videotaped it. I'm not in the videotape, just my dad putting the burgers on the grill.

Meanwhile, 'they' decided to call me an enneagram type Three. I have changed my enneagram type so many times, usually when 'they' decide that I am some particular type instead of another type - that it totally discredits the enneagram (and also the Myers-Briggs, too, because for years I called myself an INTP, or an INTJ, or an INFP, only to eventually agree with 'the voices' when they told me I was an ISTP, only to change it later to ISFP). It makes the system look useless, if it's so easy to call yourself the wrong type for so long, and struggle for months or years to interpret everything you do according to that type.

But I don't want to discredit the personality typing systems, because you can still see from observation that there really are different categories of people, and that everyone fits into some kind of category. When I was young, it was simply the people I liked in one category, and the people I didn't like in the other category. There were people who understood me and could talk to me, and people who didn't. So I've read about personality typing systems to find out why. Anyway, now they are describing me as a Three, merely because I googled 'time management' and started enjoying Mark Forster's website, and because I used to read self-help books about self-esteem and time management and other things like assertiveness training.

They still think my instinctual stacking is sp/so for right now. I'm guessing they'll change that around in the future too, since they've changed it so many times already. Those instinctual stackings are actually more important than most people know. They are another, separate personality typing system all by themselves, and you don't need to know the enneagram to be able to see the instinctual stackings. Many of the actors doing the Harvey Putter spoof seemed to be the so/sx type, and they behave totally differently than I do, and I wouldn't fit in there. I'm too cold and serious and businesslike. Or a prude. Whatever you want to call it.

So anyway some people might think that all personality typing systems are useless, because you can call yourself the wrong type for a very long time, or change it around and call yourself some other type, and then try to interpret everything you do according to that label, and you can make it sound believable, only to decide later on that you're not really that type and it was all wrong. Much of this is happening because of 'them.' 'They' are usually the ones who suggest that I change my type.

I could learn a lot more about the personality types. I could observe them. I could interview people. I could compare myself to other people and see the similarities. But that's something that I don't have enough time to do, and I'm not interested in it enough to make it a big project. I'm only slightly interested in it. I'm not going to become an expert on it. So I am a non-expert trying to decide what my type is, while also, not being able to actually *be* myself, because I am a puppet who says things, and does things, when the attackers force me to do and say them, so it's not the real me. (Although sometimes they push me to do things that I 'sort of agree with,' such as, talking to the guy that I have a crush on, and continuing a relationship with him, and by the way, he only wrote a few letters for a few days, and then he hasn't been writing, again, but they still want to make me send letters to him now and then even though I don't usually get an answer. And I am still going to see him in person.)

I've decided to start visiting Mom and Dad several times a year, because they are in their sixties - I asked them, since I can never remember their birthdays - Dad is 65 and Mom is 63, or maybe he's 66 and she's 64, I forgot again. (Mom said she gave birth to me when she was 28 or almost 28. So I can add 27 or 28 to my own age.) So they're going to die soon, and it could be anything random, it could be a sudden heart attack or stroke, or it could be anything at all. So I will schedule more frequent visits.

I was going to talk about Harvey Putter, but I ended up talking about my visit to Mom and Dad instead.

I was also going to talk some more about being an enneagram type Three. But I think a lot of things can be understood about me from the descriptions of the ISFP Myers-Briggs type, if you read descriptions written by the right authors. David Keirsey has portrayed the SP artisans as a bunch of wild, crazy, motorcycle-riding, chainsaw juggling, brainless gorillas, or at least that's the feeling I get. He doesn't show the people who seem plain and ordinary and don't do anything 'extreme.' We are not all trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for balancing the most spoons on our face, and we aren't all entering the Olympics and doing ski jumps, or anything like that. But his book makes it sound like that's what we do. There are other websites that have a more mellow, normal-person description of the SP artisans. Some of us are rather dull and boring.

'Dull and boring' is how I describe myself. This is what I think of the enneagram Three. You don't have any particular personality of your own, so you collect a bunch of belief systems, and those belief systems become who you are. But I always thought Threes were the essence of mainstream, middle-of-the-road culture. That's not necessarily true. They can be countercultural, and they can go out and find a belief system that's different from the mainstream one that their parents gave them. That happened for me when I was in my teens. First, I read a book about assertiveness training, and that was something nobody had ever taught me, so I started teaching it to myself. Then a little bit later, my brother found Ayn Rand's book 'The Fountainhead' and shared it with me, and so we both became Ayn Rand readers, and she is the basis of all my beliefs about government and anarchism that I still have today.

I think that other people see me as dull and boring, but inside, I have feelings that are not dull and boring at all. And when I write music, the music is not at all dull and boring. It isn't mainstream music. However, I like to write happy music more than sad music, or bright rather than dark. But I don't like it to be all easy. I like to see the music struggling with the darkness and eventually getting through it. I don't like unresolved sadness in my music. So I don't usually write a song that's all about sadness and nothing but that. It's a song that has moments of sadness but it has a happy ending. And I haven't totally finished any songs - I just have a few fragments of ideas, actually, a lot of them, a whole folder full of them, but they are all unfinished.

Music most directly expresses my feelings, and I can't find much music that I like on the radio. If the 'dull and boring' enneagram Threes aren't the source of the horrible radio music, then who is? Why is there terrible music on the radio, and nothing but terrible music? I used to blame almost everything on enneagram Threes, back when I was in my phase of trying to profile 'who is responsible for this horrible culture we live in?' Or rather, I guess it was the voices who were trying to get me to do that profiling. It probably wasn't me. It would have been one of those 'discussions' that we have. Anyway, I thought that Threes were the ultimate selfless conformists, so they would be one of the sources of bad radio music.

A 'connected' enneagram type is someone who keeps doing something even if it doesn't work very well. That doesn't come from the enneagram itself. It's another personality system created by a different person. In fact, a lot of things that I say are part of the enneagram are actually other personality systems that have been fitted in with the enneagram. Someone, perhaps Karen Horney, is that her name? Someone observed connected, disconnected, and ambivalent personality types. She observed that on her own, and never knew about the enneagram. And a lot of the useful observations that I have come from those other writers who aren't part of the enneagram at all. They've just been fitted in with the enneagram by modern authors.

This is too complicated to explain in a brief blog, but, to make a long story short, I think that some of those people are being misled by number games. They think that if there are 'three' of something, then it must be able to fit in with the enneagram somehow if you make nine combinations of it. So they find a way to make nine combinations of something. And it might be that in reality, those nine combinations aren't the most important, they aren't the most relevant, and if you had never heard of 'nine' of anything, it wouldn't necessarily have occurred to you that there would be nine combinations, and instead, you might have observed only five combinations when you made your direct observations of people, or something like that. Numbers can make you put extra emphasis on something that isn't very important, some attribute of something. If you only observed five of something by direct observation, then you *have* to fill in the remaining spaces and add four more to make the number nine, then you might emphasize things that don't really matter very much, and give them their own separate categories when they really would fit better into the five categories you originally observed.

There are people who can't stand the enneagram because it has three-based numbers and nine-based numbers instead of four-based numbers and sixteen-based numbers. Some of the Myers-Briggs people (on the internet) have tried to overlay the sixteen MB types with the nine enneagram types. They think that you have to squeeze the two systems together, so that all ISTJs are enneagram type one, and that kind of thing.

I like something I saw in one of my books. It was a book that Judith Swack recommended for people who didn't know anything at all about the enneagram and were just beginning, a baby-level book. A small book, I think it was yellow, and it had cartoon drawings in it. (It's in storage somewhere.) In the back of that book, they had an observation-based chart of which Myers-Briggs types TENDED to fall within which enneagram types. They didn't try to use logical abstraction to 'imagine' which types 'should' fit into which categories. They just observed that lots of ISTJs tended to be Ones, Threes, and Sixes, for instance, but they would hardly ever be a Two or a Four. That's just an example. SP artisans are so common that they could be almost any enneagram type. SP artisans are probably the most common type of human being in the whole population, if I recall correctly.

Some of the attributes being described by the Enneagram seem to overlap with things being described by Myers-Briggs, but not totally. The two systems are different and you can't force them to fit together. You get a little bit of correlation with 'F' types going into the enneagram Two and Four, but that's about all. Almost all the other enneagram types have a variety of Myers-Briggs types in them.

There is something unfortunate having to do with falling in love with complementary types. Imagine that I am an ISFP type Three. Then, imagine that something you read somewhere gave you the impression that Threes and Fours tended to have a special sort of relationship, the kind of relationship you would want to have. Well, then, it sucks to be me, because there aren't any ISTJs or ESTJs in enneatype Four, right? That's just an example. I can find ESTJ type Nine, or ISTJ type Nine, but the Nines are most strongly attracted to Sixes, and they almost always end up with them.

In fact, in all the shallow, cheesy children's cartoon movies, the love story is ALWAYS a six-and-nine love. The Six, suspicious, distrusting, and sometimes abusive, towards the easygoing, trusting, mellow Nine who makes everything okay. I'm thinking of, for instance, 'How To Train Your Dragon.' I like dragons, and I like movies about dragons, but I didn't like HTTYD all that much (it was cute, but I didn't bother watching it again), and I thought it was shallow, and the love story was, yawn, yet another six-and-nine-falling-in-love story. (When I say 'abusive,' in that movie, the Six female was often punching the Nine male character, and saying 'This is for whatever you did (punch!).' Ever since I read Warren Farrell's books, I disapprove of movies that show women punching men and it's supposed to be funny and cute and a sign of female strength and power.)

All the computer animated cartoon fairy tale fantasy movies are showing sixes and nines falling in love, as though those are the only types of human beings who exist on earth. And they are also So/Sx instinctual stackings, so the characters are all interested in issues such as 'How Do I Fit In With My Society And Get Approval, When I'm A Skinny Little Kid Who Can't Fight Dragons?' It would be more interesting to see cartoons written about OTHER personality types falling in love, or struggling with other issues besides 'how can I fit in with my society and get a better social status?'. That's why I'm so interested in personality types. It's very useful for creating fictional characters! If you think that personality type systems aren't useful for anything, they're useful for making imaginary characters that are realistic and believable, but aren't the same old boring, predictable, Six-and-Nine-falling-in-love characters that you see everywhere.

Imagine that you rolled a dice at random to choose a random personality type, and you were forced to write a story about that type of person, and their most important issues and struggles. The dice would tell you their enneagram type, and also the enneagrams 'level of development' (which would suggest things to you such as, were they physically and psychologically abused as children, or did they grow up in a safe and healthy home? Are they a 'good' or 'evil' character?), their Myers-Briggs type, and their instinctual stacking. So you could get a really difficult combination, or perhaps an impossible or unlikely combination (is it possible that you could get an ISTJ type Two after all, even though we don't think we've seen any, or many, of those in the real world?). You'd get some interesting combination that you wouldn't see in every single shallow love story that's already been written.

Then you'd have to go out and look for someone who reminded you of that type, and interview them, and get to know their style of talking. You don't want to just make the character a puppet who talks like you, the writer. You want them to say unpredictable things that you yourself wouldn't think of. That's the whole point of talking to and interacting with other human beings! They see things differently than you do. They say things you wouldn't say, do things you wouldn't do, think of things you wouldn't think of. They do things that are unexpected, unthinkable, inconceivable, strange. Puppet characters who speak with the voice of the writer aren't interesting, unless it's maybe only one character who is supposed to represent you in the story, if you want to live in that world along with your characters and experience what they're experiencing.

So that's one useful thing you can do if you study personality typing systems. You can create more interesting fictional characters, and they won't be the same old boring types that you see in all the other movies. I like this idea, because it says that every human being has some redeeming characteristic, some reason to live, something good about them that's worth looking at, worth writing about, worth watching in a movie or a book. Every human being has a reason to exist. Every human being is part of an interesting story.

I'll post this now and I might watch Harvey Putter again before I write my big spoiler blog about it. Yes, that's a warning, it will be a bunch of spoilers if you haven't seen the movie. I accidentally got spoiled just from reading something on the movie's website - there was one part of the website where they told what happens to the books' author in the end of the movie. Oops. And I didn't intend to get a spoiler, either, so I was annoyed, and I stopped reading and didn't look at anything else on that page. It was some page, perhaps the 'lexicon' or something like that, one of the tabs at the top of the screen, that takes you to a page with a list of all the characters, and some other things, where it gives definitions of them all.