Today was my last day at The Wrong Travel Agency, and I'm happy, or at least relieved. I'd celebrate except, well, it's hard to celebrate a failure. I don't mind having made a mistake of this nature, at least not as much as I once would have, but there's some residual embarrassment at having to give up. I really don't know why. This was a reasonable attempt in a reasonable situation and it didn't work out at all so I left. The end. Right?
The sad fact is I drag around a lot of old fear and shame, especially in terms of what I do for a living. Sort of like a borrower crab, I pick up odd things and try to make a home out of them. No matter how ludicrous, I'll hang on to something until it completely falls apart as long as I think it might work. This has lead to debilitating, soul-destroying periods where I've been in a job so wrong it's hard to believe I didn't get fired, jobs that had me convinced I was a complete fuck-up with no redeeming qualities and the personality of a mollusk. Since I am usually considered a forceful personality you can tell I was in bad shape.
As it happens, I'm slightly dubious about being pegged as a forceful personality, but I keep getting hints that people find me intimidating. It used to happen in school reports and job reviews all the time, the old "doesn't play well with others" type of comment which I find so baffling. I always figured it was because none of them knew me very well, but no. It came up again quite recently as a result of my posting that funny old photo from 1988, the one where I'm trying to look sexy and only succeed in smirking. I was slightly unprepared to hear from a couple of friends telling me it reminded them of how edgy I once was with my mini mohawk and perpetual leather jacket. Get out of here. I'm a suburban mall rat from way back. All I did was go around with purple hair and black clothing, listening to bands that didn't get played on MTV. My piercings were limited to three holes in each ear. True, I had tattoos, and that was not typical of my crowd. On the other hand, I wore glasses. How could I have possibly intimidated anyone? But it seems my disguise worked better than I realized. How amusing.
All the same, it's hard for me to believe anyone thinks I'm a handful. This lead me to think about how I perceive other people. Mainly, I take everyone's projected persona as the operative reality unless it's transparently false or until rudely awoken. I'm a face-value sort of gal. I don't really want to get to know anyone unless they intrigue me, and few people intrigue me, these days anyway. Then I started thinking about my dog personality test, the one which once led Luke McGuff to stop talking to me for three months because I said he was just like a chihuahua (he was! He was!). I've been developing it for years. I love the idea of taking a personality test that would tell you what kind of dog you'd be if you were a dog. After all, the secret to successful pet-owning is getting the right animal for you, and dogs come in all kinds of personalities. You have your working dogs, your hunting dogs, your small yappy dogs, your weird-hair dogs, and the infinite varieties of mutts. I think of myself as a terrier, sort of short and cheerful and periodically loud. I'm very fond of this image. It's undoubtedly wrong.
I tested this by asking a fellow at ElderMOO named Numbat (he's from Australia, as are numbats) what he thought. Numbat is a big fan of furry cartoons, and he thinks of people in terms of what animals they'd be, not just dogs. He's very good at discerning the inner panda, or cockatiel, or whatever. Several other MOO inhabitants joined in the discussion as we assigned various friends their animal status. Because he's so clever at this game, I asked him what he thought I'd be. He horrified me by saying he'd always seen me as a carnivore, probably feline. Gah! No! Pretensions to being catlike are far too fannish! I can't stand people who think they have a special relationship with cats and give themselves nicknames like Tigerton Whitepaws or Mousedancer. If you think I'm exaggerating, you haven't been to a science fiction convention. I shrieked (in text, of course, since we were on MOO) at Numbat. He decided to try again while reminding me that he was only doing it because I was intimidating him.
Eventually, we hit upon the notion of me as a bear. I can go for that. Bears are mostly solitary with spates of socializing. They're ungainly and plump but capable of amazing speed and intensity when roused. They're rather grumpy and standoffish after they grow up but remain loving to their family members. They spend a lot of time eating, hem hem. They sleep for months at a time. I can see the parallels, oh yes.
So that's me sorted. As for the rest of my friends, I hope to offer you the Dog Personality Test sometime before taking my next job. I'm feeling incredibly creative and driven as a result of knowing I'm free of early mornings and 8 hours away from the computer for at least the next week. I'll job hunt in the morning and work on the test's script in the afternoon.
I wonder if anyone would pay me to work on a computer designing graphics and personality tests? Naaaaaaah...
