The 2017 Reboot

Yikes, it's been over a year since my last post, but now I'm back and hoping to stick around. As you may have noticed, I changed up the theme of the blog a little bit (and of course I changed my name on Google+) to better reflect the new and improved me (keep reading for the big but pretty obvious reveal). 2016 was an, ahem, interesting, year for me and many others, but I won't talk about all the crazy stuff that happened in the public sphere (read: the political circus of the primaries and general election) because others have done more than enough writing on that subject, and also because this blog is about me (hooray for millennial selfishness). Unfortunately, I'm not feeling particularly inspired to do any real writing at the present moment, so I'll go ahead and lazily repost some stuff I put up on my Facebook page. To start off, here's my transgender coming out post, cutting to the chase like a boss (as usual, links were added after the initial "publication"):

I was going to wait to do this until the inauguration because it would have had more impact as a defiant action/statement, but I don't want to wait any longer, so ... *takes breath* ... I am officially coming out as a transgender woman (a.k.a. Male to Female / MtF).

After considerable thought and reflection, I have determined that my decision to pursue transition, despite the concerns and pleas of my parents and other conservative family members, is the right thing for me, and in the last two months of hormone replacement therapy I have felt much more at peace and comfortable with myself than ever before.

I am aware that this decision is not to be taken lightly, and that especially with the incoming administration I am essentially painting a target on my back and placing myself into an at-risk minority group, not just as far as legal rights are concerned (see: "bathroom bills" like North Carolina's infamous HB2) but also personal safety (transgender people are routinely harassed, assaulted, and murdered by hateful individuals, just on the basis of their gender identity).

Despite these risks and also the potential health risks (although relatively minor), I am confident that I am making the right choice and I'm excited for what the future will bring.

The post was quite well-received, and in fact it is probably the most Liked post that I've ever had on Facebook. That said, there was a bit of negativity (unsurprisingly) from some of my family members, who do not understand how transition works and are worried that HRT (hormone replacement therapy) will either kill or seriously cripple me. Yes, there are some health risks associated with HRT, but honestly the likelihood of seriously bad stuff happening is pretty low, and regular blood tests and vital checkups should hopefully ensure that everything is progressing as expected and without complications. There are millions of other transgender people around the world who have gone through the process and have been just fine, so it can't be that dangerous to pursue medical transition. Surgery is a bit dicier, and there are definitely more risks associated with that, but I don't have to worry about making that decision just yet since 1) it's expensive and I'm not made of money, and 2) one can't even try to get it until undergoing at least one year of HRT and jumping through a bunch of gatekeeper hoops.

Moving right along, the next thing from Facebook that is worth reposting here is my updated About section / bio, which duplicates some information about me that is already scattered throughout my blog but also adds some new details as well. Moreover, I think it does a fairly decent job of nicely packaging up various aspects of me that I consider important into a digestible and not excessively verbose format. Without further ado, here it is:

"What are the integral facets of your identity?" - Robin Alexander Wilke

I always struggle when faced with the task of describing myself, because the temptation is great to just furnish a laundry list of adjectives that neatly encapsulate some aspect of my personality. I'll refrain from doing that this time, and instead I'll focus and expand upon some of the most important aspects of my identity in its present state.

First and foremost, I am a creature endowed with the gift of cognition. I am most thankful for my capacity to think and reason and solve interesting problems. My predilection for logic and systematic thinking is conducive to pursing hobbies and a career in the world of information technology (IT), and indeed I am a web developer, a gadget freak, and a gamer. I am a child of the 90s, the era in which the Internet was starting to take off in a big way, and I am amazed at just how important a part it now plays in most people's lives. My interest in cognition has also led me to explore aspects of psychology, most saliently personality typing systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (along with its more jargon-laden peer, Socionics) and the Enneagram. I'm an INTP in MBTI-land and an Ennagram Five, for anyone who is curious. I wrote a blog post in November 2015 about the MBTI so I won't go any further in depth about it now.

More recently, I discovered that I really enjoy the sport of running, and nowadays cycling as well. There is a profoundly primal joy in the act of moving through the world, which is much stronger when that motion is a product of one's own musculature (i.e. self-powered vs. power-assisted locomotion). As a result of having been turned on to Christopher McDougall's Born to Run book, I am now a minimalist / barefoot enthusiast, and I've exclusively worn Vibram Five Fingers (and now Vibram Furoshiki shoes) as my footwear of choice since early 2013. My training has declined a bit lately from its 2014 peak, due to work and other life commitments, but I am stubbornly continuing to take my fitness very seriously, and I am currently in the midst of a running streak (defined by running at least one contiguous mile per day) that began on June 24th, 2016.

Even more recently, I figured out that I identify as female, contrary to my birth-assigned male biological sex. This has been a shocking revelation not just to me but also to those around me, and it definitely hasn't been easy pursuing the exploration of my gender identity because of fears about how others would perceive me. I don't fall into the typical transgender narrative in that my feelings of gender mismatch did not reach a conscious level until adult age, but in retrospect this revelation explains a lot of things about my past. It's difficult to convey in words the feeling of "rightness" that beginning to align my body with my true gender has brought me, because to most people gender isn't something that merits a second thought. I didn't realize that being "male" weighed heavily upon me until I started exploring what it feels like to be "female" through temporary and reversible changes like body hair removal, wardrobe choices, makeup, and painted nails. The more I continued along this path the more I noticed that I did in fact experience gender dysphoria, and now that I am in the midst of medical transition my dysphoria is steadily declining, leaving room for me to be able to cultivate a greater enjoyment of life and discover increased confidence in my body and my outer appearance.

There's a lot more to me than the above, but I think this was a good start, so thanks for reading.

One last thing that is worth mentioning in this life update post is that I am in an awesome and exciting new relationship as of August 16th with someone truly special (whose blog has been even less recently updated than mine). I'm hoping that as I get back into writing and content creation, I'll be able to convince him to do the same, in the capacity permitted by time constraints, of course.

--lbds137

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Cognitive Theory

I've been meaning to write on this subject for a long time now (and in general to post content more frequently!) but my lingering insecurities, combined with excessive perfectionism, have made it difficult for me to get motivated enough to produce content of sufficient quality (as determined by my self-judgment) to warrant publication in a publicly accessible location (even despite my self-professed informality at the outset of my blogging adventures back in 2013). Luckily for me, I recently fortuitously discovered a fantastic blog written by a gentleman who calls himself Eevee (after the cute and fluffy Pokémon creature of the same name) and whose interests and writing style intersect with mine to a non-trivial extent. I was initially directed to his blog by my manager at my day job, who shared Eevee's highly detailed and informative post on the myriad things wrong with the PHP programming / web scripting language in our #random Slack channel. Since this discovery I have continued following Eevee's blog and hungrily devouring his excellent writing on various subjects (mostly related to programming, since that is his main area of expertise), going as far as to support him on Patreon (a useful site for supporting content creation, despite their unfortunate recent hack).

So what motivated me to write this post? The second post so far that I have commissioned Eevee to write (the first having been on the thorny but fascinating subject of the War on Drugs) was dedicated to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a "personality test" (a term with which I take some issue) that places people into one of 16 categories that indicate certain broad patterns of thinking and behavior specific to each type category. I had already done extensive research on the subject, having rekindled my interest in the subject this past spring while in the process of looking for a job and working with a talented Arlington County career counselor to this end, but I was curious to get Eevee's take on this subject given my strong suspicions that he, like me, is an INTP. I was pleased (but not surprised) that he produced a solid (and humorous, as is his trademark) post on the subject, and after reading it I couldn't help but comment on it and offer my own thoughts on the theory behind the MBTI (essentially a semi-brief and informal summary of my research findings). My comment on his post follows below (relevant links and formatting added after initial "publication").

Thanks for indulging me in what was honestly mostly a fishing expedition on my part to get you to cough up your own type to confirm my suspicions (I was 95% sure you would test as an INTP given your writing / discourse style). I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying MBTI theory, buying several e-books in the process (of varying quality) and devouring them in a relatively short time span this past spring. Oh, and I also read a bunch about socionics, which is the Russian take on MBTI that introduces a bunch of wacky new stuff that sort of meshes with MBTI in most places but seems to diverge a bit in others. Suffice it to say that socionics makes the MBTI cognitive stack theory look like it was written by a toddler, in the sense that it goes way more in-depth and actually proposes an ordering of 8 (!) functions instead of just 4, although it still manages to come up with the same(-ish) 16 types due to some fairly complicated theoretical calculus that does not allow certain combinations (because obviously there exist considerably more possible ways to arrange 8 distinct things than just 16).

OK, so back to MBTI itself. It tends to get a bad rap because it gets frequently misunderstood / misused (especially by corporate folks, as other commenters have pointed out) to put people in boxes (as you mentioned in your post). I totally get that, and I don't think it's fair to deny someone a job (or anything really) just based on their type (which can often be misrepresented by the actual MBTI instrument since people's general mood / affect at the time of taking the test can have an impact on their responses and hence their computed type). That being said, I have consistently been impressed with the predictive capabilities of the theory, in that certain types have tendencies to think and act in certain ways, in accordance with the ordering of their cognitive functions. I've made it a personal sport to try to guess at the types of the people I interact with regularly (and even the types of fictional characters from movies / TV shows), and not just make wild guesses but actually examine their outward behavior and theorize about what that implies about their inner cognitive preferences (and why).

I think that the superficial "horoscope" approach does the theory a great disservice, because it tries to boil down what is actually a pretty nuanced theory into generic-sounding personality profiles that may or may not match up with a person's experience in his / her own life. The problem is that MBTI is more of a high-level blueprint of how a person makes decisions (Judging) and takes in information from the world (Perceiving), which can manifest wildly differently in people based on the sum total of decisions they've made along the way in their lives and the specific experience they've had just living life, rather than a concrete and rigid explanation of every facet of a person's personality (which is most definitely not the goal of MBTI).

Experienced MBTI practitioners / researchers who actually know their stuff will in most cases shy away from calling it a personality typing system and instead describe it as a system for teasing out a person's cognitive preferences. This approach leaves a lot more leeway for personal differences, since preferences (whether influenced by nature, nurture, or more likely an interplay between the two) can manifest very differently based on idiosyncratic and environmental factors. Obviously the same falsifiability criticism still applies, since we still don't know why or how the theorized cognitive functions (Ti / Te, Ne / Ni, Si / Se, and Fe / Fi) actually come about and what they mean in terms of a person's actual neurological make-up (e.g. whether they correspond to specific neural networks that can be discerned in a lab setting).

For what it's worth, I really identify with my own type (surprise, surprise, I'm an INTP too) and am almost creeped out by how well Dr. A. J. Drenth's e-book on INTPs (oh yeah, he's an INTP too) describes my inner mechanisms and what they entail in terms of strengths and weaknesses (yes, weaknesses). The fact that a complete stranger can have this insane amount of insight into how I think and behave is a big part of why I'm a believer in MBTI, because without some predictive validity to the theory the chances of this happening are infinitesmally small (since getting so many things right by pure chance / guessing is highly unlikely – think of the whole "monkeys with typewriters eventually writing Shakespeare's works" thought experiment).

Not only that, but I have developed a pretty good "INTP radar", sniffing them out based on the almost immediate intellectual kinship I feel with them based on written or oral expressions of their ideas and theories. A couple of my friends are INTPs (not to mention my French teacher and mentor in high school), and the level of discussion about pretty much anything that I can have with them is virtually unmatched in the amount of intellectual satisfaction it provides (versus having similar conversations with people of other types). This is not to say that all INTPs are necessarily geniuses or anything, because I'm sure there are plenty of "dumb" INTPs out there, but the ones I've interacted with have generally been consistently insightful with regard to a wide variety of topics I care about (and plenty that I don't care that much about).

There's something magical about having my Ti and Ne interface with that of another person, whether via written medium or verbally. As Dr. Drenth puts it in his INTP book: "One of the beautiful things about written works is they can be carefully selected to match the INTP's current concerns and interests. Books may do for INTPs' Ne what new sexual experiences might for STPs or music for Feeling types." Of course this can be expanded to any piece of writing, like well-written and researched blog posts, which at least to some extent explains my ready willingness to buy a lot of books and just generally financially support the creation of quality content (e.g. via Patreon) from authors whose intellectual authority I trust.

Anyway, I could go on and rant about this stuff a lot more, because it is infinitely fascinating to me, but I guess my point is that there's a lot more depth to MBTI than most people realize, and I don't think it's fair for people to write it off as just another horoscope analogue, because it's so much more than that. It is certainly problematic, though, that lots of people have thoughts on MBTI, not all of which do the actual theory justice, and also that the theory itself is in my opinion not fully developed yet and can't really ever gain an aura of scientific acceptance until we figure out the underlying mechanisms by which these magical cognitive functions actually come about (e.g. by creating artificial intelligence / neural networks that process information in a way that approximates how people do it using their MBTI cognitive functions). Still, at least for me it's fun to think about this stuff and try to use it to better manage my real-life relationships with others based on a deeper understanding of how types interact with each other, understanding the limitations of not just other people's types but also my own and trying to work around them to develop more harmonious and fulfilling relationships with others (something that will always be a work in progress, of course).

/rant

I have a lot more thoughts on the MBTI and socionics, most of which will probably never see the light of day (such is the way of the INTP), but I think this is a decent enough approximation for now, not to mention that Eevee's post is already chock-full of information that I'm not going to reproduce here, for the sake of avoiding unnecessary redundancy and also sending him some web traffic (ha, just kidding, he gets way more traffic than I do since he's a way more prolific writer and a better programmer than I am). In any case, I will continue to refine my understanding of MBTI theory and apply it to my own life, and hopefully the theory itself will continue to be developed and maybe even validated scientifically (wouldn't that be nice!) at some point in the future.

--lbds137

Better Late Than Never

Cliché is generally frowned upon by writers with any degree of skill and self-respect, amateur and professional alike, but from time to time certain occasions arise in which it is desirable and even preferable to utilize such a literary device (if it can be termed thus). As I attempt to write this post for (at least) the third time, I am willing to do whatever it takes to convince myself to follow through and actually publish it, and if I can use cliché as a tool to get the ball rolling, then so be it. Quite obviously, the cliché I refer to is the title of this post, which is a rather blunt acknowledgement of the nearly 11 months that have elapsed without a single entry in my humble, languishing blog.

It is highly tempting for me to offer excuses (valid or otherwise) for why I have not written anything here in so long, but I will (at least temporarily) refrain from doing so for a couple of reasons: first, I am still struggling to compose a convincing mental narrative (a prerequisite of any autobiographical writing exercise, as far as I'm concerned), and second, I want to return to blogging with a flourish, not a whimper. To this end, I am finally posting the Valentine's Day poem that I promised back in January, rather than waiting another couple of months for the relevant occasion to arise again.

Adrift on the endless sea, subjected to the whims of the cruel wind,
Lost in the vast, tumultuous expanse yet not quite wanting to be found,
Overwhelmed by the suffocating solitude yet strangely calm, I grinned.
No longer deferring to violent and mercurial emotions, I was unbound.

Enchanting as they may be, the sirens of the sea are a dangerous lot,
Offering their victim false companionship with their poisonous tune,
Nefariously indulging his wildest dreams to lure him to their hidden spot,
Voraciously devouring him and then swiftly resuming their evil croon.

Approaching the sirens' lair, I quickly searched my ship for beeswax,
Liquefying it with a strong flame and hastily jamming it into my ears,
Eliminating the witches' auditory threat and allowing myself to relax.
Nearby, I imagined them cursing my escape and succumbing to tears.

Though the end of my journey seemed distant, even many years away,
I rejoiced in the knowledge that my mind was free and my heart content,
Not weighed down with longing but rather savoring the present day,
Eagerly awaiting the next grand adventure, no matter where I went.

Someday you will find this message in a bottle, and I will be long gone,
Dead and decaying in a quiet grave, a lone corpse forgotten and alone.
All I ask is this: be not the duckling that desperately wishes to be a swan.
You are worthy in your own way, so seize this day and make it your own.

I would likely succumb (once more) to arrogance if I seriously entertained the idea that this poem is complex enough to warrant a lengthy and scholarly explanation, and moreover, even if I were a poet of such caliber, it would take away from the poem's mystery if I were to pull back the curtain and expose the process by which I composed it. Suffice it to say that I wrote it to make myself feel better during a (both literally and figuratively) dark and cold winter season and that the optimistic imagery in the latter half of the poem did at least partially accomplish that goal. Any further interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.

--lbds137

The Obligatory Inaugural Post

All good things (or bad things, for that matter) must start somewhere, and my humble personal web log (henceforth referred to as "my blog", "the SOSS", or perhaps "the sauce") is no exception. I suppose the expectation is that this inaugural blog post will shed some light on a few key questions you may already be asking your computer screen, such as "who the heck is this guy?" and "why should I bother reading his unsolicited ramblings?".

I'll defer the answer to the first question to my Google+ profile, because I don't want to bore you to death in my very first post (don't worry, that will probably happen later). The answer to the second question is a moving target, as I figure things out, but a temporary answer is that you might learn something new or at least be somewhat entertained by my second-rate writing (and sporadic self-deprecating attempts at humor).

As you may have read in the description of my blog, you can expect to read "potentially opinionated rants about music, running, biking, technology, and whatever else I feel like writing about" on a semi-regular basis (read: whenever I feel like posting something). The length of my posts will probably vary widely depending on the subjèt du jour ("subject of the day" for those of you who don't speak French), but you can expect at least a few paragraphs of half-baked discussion and analysis (and copious amounts of parenthetical addenda such as this one). In general, I will try to employ standard American English spelling and grammar, but on occasion I may choose to break convention for effect or just because I feel like it. I will probably take advantage of Blogger's labeling functionality to make it easier for you to find posts about your favorite topics, but of course I have to write a bunch of posts about stuff first. Stay tuned!

--lbds137 (this is how I will sign my posts henceforth)