indulgent question
By shag carpet bomb • Jul 3rd, 2008 • Category: Belly Button Lintindulge me, all 5 readers! in the past few months, i’ve been described as “intense”. this is a word people have used in the past but it is so vague (to me) that i don’t understand what it means.
what do you guys think?
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Based on what I’ve seen of your writing, you have a pretty formidable ability to stick with an argument and follow it through, and you do it with passion. My experience is that “intense” is a word that’s fairly commonly used to describe someone whose thought processes are challenging to keep up with, or whose energy is very focused. I would describe some of your posts as “intense.” It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back.
I think it’s pretty common for people who do a lot of critical thinking to be labeled as “intense.” I guess it’s all relative. I would rather be intense than boring :-)
i nub you guys too!
the people who used the word, lately, were using it in a positive context. one guy is a friend-mentor, with whom i have a pact: we can come talk to each other about what’s shaking out at work and get a realtiy check. the other was a trainer who describe me as ‘bubbly’ and ‘intense’.
i can def. see that my intense side — critical thinking — comes out in non-work contexts and can be offputting. that is why, at work, i tend to play down stuff. e.g., i generally ask questions and solicit opinions about what other people think. when they say something i might want to smack down, were it bloglandia, i say, “really? huh.” i kind of like that, by not swaying them, i get a little more insight into what they are thinking.
anyway, i’m not very bubbly tonight as i’m living on three hours sleep and worked a 14 hr day. big deadline looms.
i wish everyone would drop in and tell me what’s up with them. i often get so busy that i forget i have a blog, which means i don’t surf too much unless i’m so busy that i can’t get involved in a project. like last night.
hmm. i’m not making sense!
In addition to the ‘thinking’ and ‘arguing’ aspects people have mentioned, the way you have described, for example, baking cakes or working out, it’s all 110%. Just like three hours sleep and a fourteen hour day. I like 110% myself.
Now my job, to ‘meet expectations’, takes about 10%, so ‘exceeds expectations’ takes 15%, and the other 95% is climbing the walls. My employers acknowledge this unused capacity and kindly provided me with my own private bookcase when they renovated. So what I am doing is filling up the shelves with the ‘economic’ works of Marx in triplicate, the pertinent volumes from the English edition, the German edition, and the massive critical edition. My first step back onto a path I gave up in order to become a caregiver.
I put off emailing during your move. Sounds like you’re mighty busy now. But I’ll see if I can’t manage a mail Thursday.