Genius Like Mine

When I was growing up, my parents, who dabble in amateur psychology, had me and my siblings each take the Meyers-Briggs personality test at some point in our development. The test takes about a half hour to do, and is composed of a whole bunch of questions that have you rate your level of agreement with a series of statements. Stuff like, "I like to take my time and get the job done thoroughly the first time" - is your level of agreement a 5, the strongest? Or perhaps that's not you at all, and you mark down a 1. Or perhaps it's middling, and you're a 3. At the end, you find out your own specific combination of letters that stand for personality traits. E stands for Extroverted, T stands for Thinker, etc. etc. More...

The staff writers here at Genius Like Mine like to keep things interesting, as all in our vast public well know. In fact, nothing delights these profligate individuals throughout their mundane days better than vacationing in the tropics, lounging in their cabanas, sipping grape wine, nibbling on truffles (being fed to them by nubile natives, no doubt) and dabbling in the creative notions of the psyche. More...

One of my close friends recently decided to quit smoking. She didn't make a big deal out of it - in fact, I had no idea, until I happened to read a post she put up on her Facebook page that casually mentioned that she had now gone a week without smoking. When I saw her the next night, I congratulated her and asked her what made her decide to quit. She said something along the lines of, "It was just time to do it."

I  have never been a smoker, although I have dated people that smoked. The closest I came to smoking was having the occasional clove cigarette with a glass of wine on my back porch. But even though it's something that I never made a habit of, I don't understand the seemingly-ubiquitous disdain that non-smokers seem to have for those who choose to light up. More...

So I just finished reading Hamlet this week, as it was this month's choice of reading for my bookclub. And reading it gave me a lot of food for thought, but more than anything...I couldn't shake the impression that, no matter how tragically heroic critics paint him, Hamlet is a gloomy and egocentric twit.

Maybe I should address a few things before I go any further, the first of which being:

1. Yes, I graduated college with a BA in English without ever having read Hamlet. More...