Originally Posted by Adam Strange
So my dream of moving to the West coast sooner or later, is gonna be a pipe dream you mean? Damn...
So my dream of moving to the West coast sooner or later, is gonna be a pipe dream you mean? Damn...
Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit
It is never a good time to buy a house in the States, so you should do it right now.
I heard that Italy's economy isn't so good right now, and a guy like yourself can do well in any environment, so get on the escalator which is rising the fastest. Plus, Southern California has a climate which is just as good as Italy's.
Your biggest problem will be in getting the wife to move away from her family. That's why I'm not in SoCal right now.
Incidentally, if I were to move to Southern California, I'd either move to the San Jose area (for the money) or to the woods and vineyards just north of San Francisco (for the climate and nature).
Last edited by Adam Strange; 12-08-2023 at 04:19 PM.
My wife's mother is LIE and she always dreamed of living in the US but her now deceased ESI husband disagreed, actually we could be talking about it over christmas...definitely thanks for your input
Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit
seems I don't know what an interior decorator really does. I was picturing cushions and bric-a-brac, not refurb. Wonder why they're not called 'interior designers'
Why not leverage one of your other two properties as collateral?
Banks afaik are looking for solvency and securities, not personal influence; for this reason I'd mentioned up a tiny mafia-run village in which influence outweighs simpler calculations on whether or not the supplicant can repay debts. One wonders why banks will loan her money for working for you when they won't loan you money for your project, particularly as you've probably more capital to begin with and on average home refurbishments tot up to less than outright purchases in a similar area
Nope. Sounds a nightmare.Have you ever dealt with trade unions and city inspectors?
With city council, it isn't surprising. That you personally would wield such influence, I had thought, wanted explanation. But you've explained it I suppose; it sounds as if you're making a backwards investment to spend time with someone who can't really return your feeling. It's understandable.Yes, a mafia-run village in Sicily in the 1950's. All trade work is so easy to do that they need unions to protect their jobs and to raise their wages. The city inspectors work both for the city and for themselves, because they get paid extra to revisit you for a failed inspection, and the city......the city will do anything to get money. Ann Arbor city council isn't so much the mafia, but rather a communist playground for high school political wanna-bees, but they have mafia-like powers to extract cash from land owners.
It is clever of you to have learnt to use Se. Life should be lived, not just planned-for. Only the funerals seem likelier prospects at this point...
I could just as easily have asked if you were a member of the royal family, though the US haven't got a constitutional monarchy, and Adam the mafia don amused me more.
Middle class will put on airs I suppose. My parents' house is both larger and around 50% more valuable after conversions and they act as if they can't afford anything; they've lived in the same city since I was born in the late 80s, and lived in that house nearly as long. But after all it's a bigger city, so the dilemmas you've described become magnified. The area became magnetic in the late nineties - early noughties though, same time frame as celtic tiger although ostensibly unrelated.
part of American culture is our cryptic naming scheme.
I was at a party last Friday and I saw a woman there who looked a lot like an SEI-Fe, in that she seemed bright and bubbly, but after observing her for a while, I saw a more serious side and thought she might be an ESI, so I joined the group that she was in, hoping to start a conversation with her.
One of the people in the group was an ILE, with whom I get along, but who kids me a lot about my Socionics obsession. He noticed that I was paying attention to the woman and he asked me if I'd like an introduction. I said, "Sure".
The ILE got in front of her and said "This is Adam. He can tell what kind of personality you have just by looking at you."
The woman looked at me with a wide smile and said, with fake incredulity, "Really?" She wasn't wearing a ring.
I said, "Actually, it only works in about 80% of the cases. The remaining 20%, I haven't a clue."
"So what kind of personality do I have?", she asked.
"I think you are an ISFj, but you could be an ISFp. It's hard to tell the two types apart sometimes."
"And what does that mean?" She was thin but not delicate like an SEI, brunette dyed with blond streaks, about 40, quite pretty, and very tastefully dressed. A sure sign of 4D Si, valued or unvalued.
"It means that you are introverted...." My ILE buddy laughed. "Introverted? Are you kidding?" She was giving me a 1000 watt smile, but she had been doing that to everyone, all night, while laughing loudly at their jokes.
"Yes, I, for Introverted, and S, a Sensor, which means that you engage with the real world. F, a Feeler, which means that you know what you value, and J for a Judger, which means that you make strong judgements about what you see."
She was seeing me, now, and starting to make judgements.
"What got you interested in this?"
"I was married for many years to a wonderful woman, and one day I came home and there was a moving van in front of the house. I had no idea. We were a perfect couple, until we suddenly weren't. We were equals in every respect. We looked like a couple, we acted like a couple, and I thought we were forever, but we still broke up. The only thing I've ever found which could explain the breakup was that our interpersonal interactions clashed somehow, and this personality business explains it perfectly. And since I want to get married again" -she jumped as if she suddenly lost her balance for a second- "I can use this to find a compatible woman quickly."
"Really."
"Yes, really. And your personality comes out your face, so I can often tell what type a person is, and therefore, how I will get along with them."
"You're kidding. You can really do this?"
"He THINKS he can do that", said the ILE.
"I can do it most of the time", I said.
"Well, I just got divorced myself." She suddenly looked sad. Stricken, really. Stricken, and a bit lost.
"Do you have a picture of your ex-husband?"
"Yes!" She immediately started paging through her phone. People sometimes amaze me, with their openness, with their willingness to be vulnerable.
"I might be able to tell you what type he is, and thus, why you guys broke up."
All her bright radiance was gone now, replaced by a serious, deadly resolve. Yep. ESI, not SEI.
She handed me her phone and pointed to a picture of a guy standing next to her and two teenage girls. I squinted at the image of his face, then enlarged it.
He was an EII.
"He works as a firefighter", she said. Lol. All firefighters want to be seen as adults. As heroes.
"He's the same type as Scott, the drummer in the band up on stage. He's an INFj. He's a kid. You guys got together because you thought you were soulmates, but then you discovered that he was just a little kid, and you got tired of being his mommy."
The look on her face was not what I expected. It was a look of triumph.
She and I talked after that for about forty minutes, but then she suddenly looked at her phone and was out the door before I could ask her what I wanted to ask. Damn. I got her first name, but not her number.
I'm thinking of calling in my IOUs with the ILE, although that will be painful. He knows her.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 12-19-2023 at 02:55 AM.
What makes a house Gamma to you?
There is a thread on this site which gives examples of houses which are favored by each Quadra. I don't have a link at the moment, but I agree with its conclusions.
Gamma houses are typically spare and unadorned, with clean lines and open areas, and not much in the way of tiny details. You might see colorful art on the walls, and all the materials are of high quality and good finish. My idea of a Gamma house looks a lot like a modern art museum, but that's not exactly it, because the bedroom of my ESI interior decorator is the most feminine thing you've ever seen.
Briefly, Alpha houses are open and fresh and unexpected and are a lot like healthy kindergartens. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Beta houses are serious and lawful and often formal and assertive. Think of Japanese temples.
Gamma houses are open and democratic and serious and efficient and expensive. Think of a McDonald's restaurant, except it's a house.
Delta houses are old people's houses, full of bric-a-brac, but formal, respectable-looking, staid, heavy and fairly expensive.
I'll try to post some pictures here, but I'm insanely busy this week, so it might not be for a while.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 12-20-2023 at 03:32 AM.
Hi, @persimmonism.
I have uploaded some pictures from my house and from the house of an LIE friend, as examples of Gamma interior decoration.
https://imgur.com/a/HtbokTG
First picture is of my spare room, with an Ottoman chosen by an ESI, the lamp chosen by an IEI, and the bookcase created and built by me in my 8th grade wood shop. Solid cedar, no screws or nails.
Next few pictures are views of the interior of my LIE friend's house. I think my ESI interior decorator entirely approves of the furnishings, and I could easily live there if she were happy with it, too.
Finally in the linked series, a picture of the interior of one of my favorite restaurants, The Real Seafood Company in Ann Arbor.
I think of Gamma styling as modern, open, clean, functional, warm, uncluttered, efficient, simple, and stylish.
Here are some pictures of a house that my ESI interior decorator likes:
-bookmark here, link to be added later-
This looks VERY similar to how my gamma parents's home looks like! Yes.. open, clean, to-the-point yet tasteful. Always white walls- makes it easier to switch up decor, always hardwood floor-- easier to clean. Good natural light, house windows never facing primarily north..
I really appreciate the minimalism and warm tones. That lamp is awful though, its so whimsical and 1980s cheesy. lol.
Defiently does NOT give me delta vibes.
I see Adele as a mixture of SEE and IEE. not ESI.
That's good, because the lamp in the first picture is genuine Mid-Century Modern from the 1950's, and was owned by my Beta NF aunt. My IEI cousin keeps hinting that she wants me to give it to her. But that's not happening. I like its Ni vibes.
If you want Delta vibes in a lamp, take a look at Stiffel brass table lamps. My Delta parent's house was full of them and I inherited about nine of them. My ESI interior decorator hates them and put them all in the attic.
My ESI interior decorator has transformed my house from one which was permeated by the decorating tastes of my SLI ex-wife, to one which is heading straight towards Gamma, and for this service, I am forever grateful.
A side effect of her involvement in decorating my house is that she is nosing into every nook and cranny of my life, which is something that I didn’t exactly expect and would have thought would be absolutely out-of-bounds, except that I’m finding that her efforts to change my behavior are actually moving my life in a positive direction.
For example, I have a tendency to collect things. Multiple versions of things that I think are excellent examples of their type, and which might be useful in the future, if not now.
From an efficiency standpoint, this tendency can be bad. Who needs three Mercedes? And yet, I have three Mercedes and I don’t drive any of them. They sit in the garage because they get 7-9 MPG, and instead, I drive a Honda which gets 34. My son tells me to drive them, but God, they get three miles per dollar and that just irks me.
I have a half-dozen computers. Yes, they are not all identical, but they are very similar.
I have eight hammers. How the hell do you end up with eight hammers?
There was a time, after my divorce, when I was dating two women at the same time. They even knew about each other and it wasn’t a deal-breaker. (Both were Betas.)
So, obviously, my 4D Ne “desire for having every option available and never choosing between any of them” is running amok. And the ESI interior decorator wants to put a stop to that. Of course. She’s Ne PoLR and she hates that. Absolutely hates it.
She recently sent me a text which said:
“1. Have you arrived at any inner clarity which would make organizing your house “stick” more? (Because she clears space and I fill it up with junk.)
2. Can you commit to not filling any new space we create with more stuff until the whole place is really ready for considering any new stuff? (I tend to impulsively buy stuff which might be useful in the future.)
3. Have you decided that you can get rid of some of the things which aren’t useful to you, so you will have more space and more freedom?
Where are you at?”
She is absolutely right when she implies that having a lot of unused stuff is the opposite of being free. She is pushing me to commit to her view of the world.
Basically, she sees me doing this and she wants it to stop.
Damn. I feel that she’s right, but it’s hard to let go of a bad habit.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 02-03-2024 at 07:03 PM.
I went downtown for lunch because I had an impulsive desire for a pizza at Mani Osteria in Ann Arbor and, since I was alone, the server seated me at a small table, and because I’m older than the college crowd that fills the place at 1 PM, the table was not in a good location. No one likes old people and they don’t like to see old people when they eat, and I get that. Even I don’t like old people, and I am one.
I was about to ask the waiter for a better table with a better view, nearer to the middle of the place, but while the waiter was orbiting somewhere near aphelion, the greeter seated a young, single male at that table and I resigned myself to my fate.
I was seated near the kitchen, between a larger table full of painfully screeching Alphas and a smaller table with a young, blonde female ESI engaged in a very quiet conversation with what looked like her balding LSI uncle. He had a round paunch and a collapsing demeanor, and was well-along in the process of turning into a bat.
The LSI was reaching across the table to dip his pizza into a bowl of sauce right in front of her, and both he and his slow, transgressive Dracula-like movements were creepy as hell, and she was frowning and shaking her head, as if to say “I’m not with this guy,” but she didn’t leave the table, so she obviously needed something from him.
When I was halfway through my pizza, the conversation between the ESI and the LSI contained the phrase “I really like Ann Arbor”, giving me an in.
I turned to her and said, “Ann Arbor is a great town.”
The LSI said, almost imperceptibly, “Do you live here?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I went to school here because it was a great school at the time for Astrophysics, and I decided to stay. I met my wife here.”
The ESI said that she was still in high school (man, she looked 20 to me, but that’s a common effect of looking into the wrong end of the telescope) and that she was scouting schools to attend college.
I asked her what her interests were, and she said political science and economics. I said that the UM had great departments in both fields. (I had just read a paper by a UM professor on economics. It was worth reading.)
The LSI asked me if most of the people who live in Ann Arbor work for the University, and I replied that they either work for the University or for the hospital. The city has pushed all the manufacturing firms out past the city limits.
“Are there a lot of high tech spin-offs here? I was in the Air Force for many years and we worked with Boeing on a laser project with deformable mirrors.”
“Yes, there are a lot of spin-offs in the area. I presently work with several of them, and I’m familiar with the Boeing laser project.”
I turned to the girl, because who wants to talk to old people, and said, “The best reason for living in Ann Arbor is because everyone you meet here is smart. And very normal.”
“Oh, you’re right. Everyone we’ve talked to has been so nice to us.”
“Where do you live now?”
“Washington. DC.” She paused. “There are only politicians and lawyers there.”
“My uncle lived in Bethesda, so I’m slightly familiar with the area. In my experience, the East Coast has a lot of people who are slightly neurotic about money. As in, they never have enough of it.”
She glanced sideways at the bat but said nothing.
“As I said, the best reason to come to Michigan is to meet a smart guy.”
Her eyes lit up and she smiled. “Oh, yes. I agree with you.”
There was a lull in conversation, during which she thought about smart men and I was searching and not finding a graceful way to point her towards marrying an LIE. It’s because I’m an optimizer and I want everyone to have a maximum chance at happiness, and most ESIs don’t have a clue. I know that conversations between perfect strangers should not include marriage advice, but sometimes, that part of me takes over and I seem to have no control over it. I feellll like I’m whipped back and forth between normal and insane, like I
whipsaw
me
back..... and
and ..... turn
forth ..... me
and ........ into
back ..... the
and ....... transcendental
forth ... abstraction
and maybe I talk too much but anyway I say to her
“This is a bit off-topic, but I’m fairly good at psychological evaluations, and the guy that would be best for you is an ENTJ.”
She just looks at me, blankly. The conversation has gone where she never anticipated.
"It’s because ENTJs are good at making money (she brightened) and they only think about one thing, which is how their companies are going to make money next year.”
Now she was interested.
“The reason that they are a good match for you is that you and they are opposites. They are the type that makes the most money, and you are a type that doesn’t.”
Now her face fell, but in resignation, as if she already knew that was her fate.
“The only problem with them is that they are usually considered to be assholes. But you are immune to assholes.”
A brief, but slightly confused smile crossed her lips. I was way out on the limb and I was in danger of losing her to confusing complexity. I was also breaching normal etiquette rules, but ESIs are surprisingly tolerant of that. They are Duals to LIEs, so they have to be.
“I’m telling you this because you are the best match for ENTJs. You are immediate, and ethical. The most important thing in your life is to stay true to your beliefs (and god, at this point she settled in and was happy, because finally, someone had put a name to the path that she knew was her life).”
“The reason that rich ENTJs need you is because you are ethical, and they, in contrast, completely lack ethics.”
Both she and her uncle laughed out loud at this. They had been imagining guys who made a lot of money, and it fit. None of them had any ethics.
“They need you to keep them from doing horrible, horrible things. And they will be grateful to you for this. In return, they will treat you like a goddess.”
I get the biggest kick out of talking to ESIs. When I said “goddess”, her face took on a supreme look, as if she were thinking, yes, she always knew she was a goddess, and it was about time people started treating her that way.
But I felt as if I still hadn’t made my case. She was now looking at me strangely, which meant that she wasn’t getting the big picture. She wasn’t on board with what this stranger was selling. So I said, “Let me tell you something about people of your type. Not you, necessarily (this, to disarm her), but just people of the type that I think you are. Something that you would never tell anyone about yourself.”
“You divide people into two groups. The Good, and the Bad. And once they are in the Bad category, they never get out.”
“How do you know this?”, she asked. She didn’t try for an instant to deny it.
“I’m old, and I’m smart, and my business depends on me being able to size up people in a minute. My profits depend on it. If there’s a dollar in your pocket, it should be in my pocket, and getting that to happen requires me knowing people very well.”
Both she and the LSI laughed at the “dollar in their pocket” joke, but it is absolutely true of LIEs. She seemed entirely OK with the concept, incidentally. Or, maybe I should say, Of course she was OK with it. It was Dual behavior.
“How can I find out what my type is?” And just like that, she was hooked. Because I was seeing her for whom she really was.
“There are online tests that you can take. There is one at Sociotype.com, and another at “The Splendid Socionics Test”.
She wrote that down in her iPhone and, because they had finished their meal and had lots of things to think about, they thanked me and excused themselves and left.
And I was left to regret that no one had told me what type I am when I was seventeen.
Last edited by Adam Strange; 02-18-2024 at 03:03 AM.
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