balding angrily

So, yeah. I’m already sick of Gillespie.

I spent the last two days in small offices at small desks learning what makes me tick. Before I invest a lot of money in re-educating myself for a change in career, I wanted to spend some time and a smaller amount of money understanding my suitability to different professions. My worst fear is that I would spend 2-3 years in school and many thousands of dollars only to learn that I don’t like teaching…or whichever profession I choose.

This two-day experience was designed to learn my aptitudes - my inherent strengths, those things that, if used in my job, would give me a sense of worthiness. That’s the theory anyway.

Not that I doubt that theory. It’s just that it’s a theory, and one of the things I found out about myself is that I don’t do abstract analysis. In other words, ephemeral, non-structure-based concepts elude me. I excel at structural analysis. In other words, my bag is pulling apart concrete concepts based on things that can be seen and touched, 3D things. Not that I need to see something, but I can easily imagine a 3D, touchable, structured thing. I’ll get to why that pisses me off at the end.

Here are some highlights to the testing:

• I picked up tiny paper clip-sized pins from a tray and put them in small holes.
• I picked up the same pins and transferred them from one set of holes into another set of holes using a tweezer while a woman with a stopwatch observed, making me feel like a trained monkey.
• I arranged on a dry-erase board little hexagon tiles with words like “cow, milk, farm, eco-system, natural resource, wheat, grain” written on them while the same woman with a stopwatch observed. With my arms, bent at a simian angle, moving rapidly in front of me, and hunched over the dry-erase board, I looked like a trained monkey.
• I held a board with a tiny hole in it at arms-length and pulled it to my face while concentrating on another board held by the same woman with the stopwatch. Her board had an X on it, and I had to keep my eye on the center of the X while she held the board at different areas on her body. At one point she held the X over her crotch.
• I was given the question, “If you woke up one day to find that you didn’t have to ever sleep again and that neither did anyone else, what would you do with your time? What would you encourage other people to do?” I had to think up as many ideas as I could in a short amount of time. Since I was writing fast and coming up with ideas off the top of my head, one of my ideas was, “Wear pink underwear - the kind with little frills.” Then I got embarrassed and wrote, “Not because I’m a sicko or anything - just because, you know, I have all this time. Why not try something new?”

From these and other tests, the woman with the stopwatch determined that I excel at structural analysis, that I’m an excellent brainstormer, and that I catch on to patterns quickly.

She suggested that if I teach, I should teach higher education or prep school kids. She seemed to think that I would get very impatient in a classroom with children that didn’t get a concept fast enough. She said that I’d be great one-on-one with a kid that wasn’t getting a concept, but not a whole group of kids.

And I suck at moving pins from one set of holes to another set of holes. I can understand this - what with my fat, hairy fingers and all.

The list of possible professions in which I would use all my aptitudes was long, but this structural analysis thing seemed to be really important. Also, I need a combination of working by myself and with other people. And when I am doing something routine, my ideaphoria, or brainstorming, aptitude kicks in and my mind starts to wander. I’m a daydreamer.

Given all this and more, apparently I make a perfect architect. Fuck you, Stopwatch Lady.