The Limitations Of Language - Sounds And Symbols That Encapsulate That Which Is Fundamentally Incommunicable

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love, and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where’s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much

drops this post on ur dash like i am a cat bringing u a dead bird

INTJ vs INTP cognitive mechanics - an analysis based on an observation

With study of the cognitive functions I'm finally starting to recognize what INTJness actually feels like.

The other day, I was going through a programming tutorial as part of a larger book on the functional programming style. I was modifying the example slightly to produce a different output, and suffice it to say it wasn't working. I called on my INTP, who is doing the same tutorial, to see if they could figure it out.

Basically, my approach was trying to "tap into" my Ni, looking over the script from a zoomed-out perspective and getting a feel for where the problem might be. I get the general feeling that the second half of a certain function isn't working. I test this assumption, I was right - so now I try to narrow down in my mind where it "seems off", and come to a vague conclusion that it's probably the order of execution. I test this assumption. It works. The example is now working as expected. I don't have a clear, 100% understanding of why exactly the order of the statements was causing the particular bug, but I move on, because I realize that this kind of error is more of a general silly-mistake in how I wrote the algorithm, and isn't something instrumental to the greater goal - which is understanding the mechanics of the functional style.

My INTP friend, in contrast, looks at the script not from a zoomed-out perspective, but goes through the logic, one step at a time, analyzing exactly what each statement does and the effects it has - and how the result should look at each point in time, and why, until they figure out exactly what was wrong and why. They didn't just get a vague intuitive understanding of how to fix it and move on, they understood in detail how every single component interplays with every other, why the statement execution must be in this order for the algorithm to work, and all the other ways changing the order of the statements would affect the output. They have understood all the mechanics of the algorithm through pure logic, and it took them much longer to move on than it did for me - but unlike me, who was doing the problem for its general purpose within the goal of understanding functional programming, they felt that understanding the algorithm (which on its own is not related to functional programming at all, and is just a modified sort algorithm), was something they wanted to understand all the components of, regardless of whether it is meaningful to the purpose of the assignment.

This felt like a very illustrative moment in understanding the differences between how INTP and INTJ approach problem-solving. Of course, as INTJ I am also compelled to learn the mechanics of all sorts of things, even those irrelevant to the overarching goal of whatever the book or the tutorial or class or the thing I am studying is right now - but I would tend to note them and set them aside for later to learn, as something separate from the process. I went back over the sort algorithm with a more Ti approach myself later, after I had grasped the concepts in the chapter I was working on, and was ready to take a break. The first "goal" was gaining an understanding of the concepts in that chapter of the tutorial, and I did not allow myself to be distracted from this purpose - but when it was done I went back to the algorithm I got wrong and Ti-ed my way through the logic, step by step. But this happened in a separate process from doing the tutorial, and a separate timeline - I didn't allow the "working on this chapter" timeline to fork into the subprocess of working out this unrelated algorithm error for any longer than it absolutely needed to.

For my INTP friend, however, following this unrelated tangent - right then and there, in the middle of the process of understanding the chapter and in the same timeline - was something perfectly natural. It was natural for them to make many "deep forks" in the path to understanding the chapter, almost so much so that they may not even make it through to the end of the chapter, and instead get lost in the study of the forks and tangents along the way. As an INTJ I just could not do this - I would feel very mentally unsettled about this.

I feel the INTP approach with Ti/Ne is very thorough but incremental and undirected in its understanding; the Ni/Te approach of the INTJ is a lot less thorough, and more "overarching" - focused more on setting up the "skeleton" or the inner structure of the framework first, and then filling it out with details - and being always painfully conscious of the shape of the path one is following. Almost as if there is always this voice nagging you that this item may be irrelevant right now, come back to it later. It is like an architect trying to capture the overallness, or a writer trying to synthesize the outline of the entire story out of thin air first, and then refining all the generalities and fleshing them out. The coherent whole comes first, and is always there and always something one is deeply conscious of, and driven by. It is like the INTJ is going through every process with a general (usually not very detailed) map or compass that they follow, always internally tugging them back to North, whereas INTP is wandering through all the nooks and crannies of the landscape without a map or a compass, and seeing what kind of fascinating mental discoveries they have on the way. They may have a purpose in mind, but it can be diverted away from indefinitely and come back to later, if there are more interesting paths to explore on the way - whereas for the INTJ the interesting paths will be noted and come back to later, as it would feel "wrong" in a fundamental way to divert away from the purpose.

I still have a difficult time figuring out how Ni worked the way it did - I suppose part of it is that I already have a decent amount of programming experience, and was able to subconsciously extract a deep pattern from what I had experienced before, without knowing where exactly I had seen this before or what it was based on. My intuition was like a synthesis of patterns I had extracted before - like a deep-learning algorithm "figuring things out" from intermediate representations. This may be why it required a lot of Se input and Ti-type analysis in the very start of my programming study before I could begin to "grasp" it, as it served to "feed" my Ni with raw materials and structures to synthesize patterns and meta-patterns from, and later synthesize hunches like this. So now I can often "feel" the way to solve something, without explicitly working through the logic.

Naturally everyone who gains proficiency or experience in some field finds themselves doing this - as humans we are equipped with all the cognitive functions, after all - but as an INTJ it is my first instinct to do this to everything, and is my most visceral response to a problem - and the impulse to analyze with Ti usually comes later, as a conscious decision. As far as I understand it, for my INTP friend it was the opposite - the first response to a new concept or a problem is to analyze it and all its components and understand every small piece of the mechanics - even if they get an Ni "hunch" about what is wrong, they tend to not trust it as much, and the impulse to analyze is first and foremost.

Just some rambling observations on Ti and Ni mechanics.

*goes to the top of a cliff and and whispers to a bird which obviously doesn’t care, “It’s my birthday today” and is met with a blank stare and an indignant ruffle and is left with the words echoing emptily across the hillside*

Literary history that happened on 8 July

petition for spotify to allow users to add notes to songs. like the violin solo at 3:43 is just <3

“About every individual’s soul there is an unspoken loneliness, you might try and deny it, but it is the very intrinsic nature of the fabric of consciousness. And this void is the one we try and fill with despaired illusions of love and the pretension of not acknowledging it.”

my five year plan? read a lot of books. visit museums. walk through woods. stand in a river. adopt a little kitty. drink lemonade while sitting in a rocking chair on my porch.