my cup runneth over
The other day I was out on a walk with my dad and asked him if he was excited for our vacation in two weeks. He blinked, as if the matter of enjoyment had never crossed his mind, finally stammering out a "I mean, it's family vacation." To my dad, the stereotypical emotionless immigrant parent, it doesn't matter what he thinks or feels about things like family vacations. He does them because they're things he should do, and moments like that illustrate how differently our brains are wired.
The incident reminded me of when a close friend told me over call that after moving out and getting some distance from her parents, she'd finally started seeing them as people. Before they always seemed like parents first and people a distant second, but now that we're adults we can start to see them as the bundles of dreams and fears that they are. Even though I haven't moved out yet, I'm experiencing the same shift, on a smaller scale — I ask them new questions, poking and prodding at their brains to see what secrets fall out from the attic. Sometimes the answers I get are heartwarming, other times less so, and often I don't really know what to do with the information (or lack thereof) I gather.
I got lunch with my brother and his girlfriend after being dismissed from jury duty yesterday. She is always with him these days (has been for a while now), but I don't mind. I appreciate how much her presence makes him open up. I haven't been close to my brother since we were very young, and without her it's hard for me to get through to him because we're so different. I read somewhere that women talk to each other about how their lives are going directly but men do it more subtly, through other things like sports. The jury's still out on that one, but my brother's like that. He'll yap my ear off when we talk about our fantasy soccer teams and clam up anytime I ask him about his life. Maybe it's a guy thing, maybe a brothers thing, maybe all of the above. I don't know.
My friend sent a personality test from the Taiwan Design Expo to our group chat last week. They got assigned cool elements like Light, Rock, and "Super power" [sic]. Want to guess what I got?
That's right. Poison.
I did a bit of research and found out that the "innate personality traits" from that quiz correspond to MBTI types, which explains a lot. I know the MBTI framework has its issues, but as an lifelong ENTJ I'm tired of getting labeled a heartless bastard. I'm sick of it! Sure, we can be insensitive at times, but as with all personality types, each of our shortcomings is mirrored by a positive trait. Giving us the only element with a negative connotation and pretty much calling us toxic point-blank seems unwarranted, don't you think?
(I recognize that researching the personality test and writing a blog post about how I didn't like the results is the most ENTJ response possible, but c'est la vie.)
I will say, as someone for whom patience and gentleness doesn't come naturally, I've had to work on it a lot, but I've come a long way. My supervisor wrote this in my performance review after watching one of my recent lesson recordings with a third grader. My cup runneth over! It's been so long since I've heard praise like this.
