This post sucks

Ok, I'm really not happy with this paper, so I'm thinking it's not going to make it to my other site. However, since someone out there did request to read it, here it is. I haven't bothered correcting what now seem like glaringly obvious errors, but which for some reason I missed before turning it in for a grade. Maybe that had something to do with finishing writing it 15 minutes after I was already supposed to be at school. Rough, rough draft this is, and a shame too, because Mr. Adams deserved better. Oh well, I think I've put off posting this for as long as possible, normally at this point I would encourage you to enjoy the paper, but I'm afraid that's just not possible this time. Struggle through it if you dare!

Drunk, and lying in a field in Islington, Douglas Noel Adams, a relatively unknown writer/performer from Cambridge, England, was struck with an idea for a radio show that would eventually become a cult classic and the source of material for multiple books, a television series, and a soon to be released motion picture. This is not the story of that idea. In my paper I will instead humbly attempt to analyze the personality traits of Douglas Adams, outlining the events and biological influences which helped to shape him, and applying both the humanistic and trait theories to my conclusions. Finally I will offer my opinion as to which of these theories best helps to understand his personality.

Douglas Adams is described by those who knew him as an exceptionally gifted thinker with a broad array of interests which he always seemed to throw himself at with an equal degree of extreme passion, despite their seeming unconnectedness. As far as his being a writer is concerned, Neil Gaiman, long-time friend of Adams, and author of the book, Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once remarked that “writing novels was a profession he had backed into, or stumbled over, or sat down on very suddenly and broken.” (Simpson, 2003, p.xxv) He was referring both to Douglas’ serendipitous career in writing, and his tendency towards clumsiness. Gaiman goes on to say that Adams wasn’t so much a writer, as something else that we might not necessarily have a word for yet. “A Futurologist, or an Explainer, or Something… the most important job out there is for someone who can explain the world to itself in ways that the world won’t forget.” (Simpson, 2003, p.xxv)

But Douglas was not always lavished with such praise. When Douglas was young his parents were convinced that there was something wrong with him. Douglas did not learn to speak until the age of four. Concerned by this, they had him tested for hearing problems, or a learning disability. (Simpson, 2003, p.6) Personality traits are generally divided into two groups of influence, biological and environmental. (text, p.320) Biologically speaking, there is not a great amount recorded on Douglas Adams. His mother was a nurse, and his father reached the postgraduate level of study in theology. Since both of these accomplishments speak to a somewhat elevated intellectual capacity, and tendency toward kindness to others, it seems that Douglas did inherent much from his parents. Douglas is quoted as saying, ““My mother’s a great lady, she is somebody who is always at her best dealing with anybody else’s problems – and can never deal with any of her own.” (Simpson, 2003, p.7) This trait was passed to Douglas in the form of wanting to share his enjoyments with other people, (Webb, 2003, p.8) and his propensity for missing his writing deadlines. (Webb, 2003, p.6) From his father, Douglas may have borrowed the trait of career-hopping. When Douglas was young, his father suddenly quit his pursuit of a postgraduate theology degree and pursued employment sporadically as a teacher, a probation officer, a lecturer, a management consultant and even a computer salesman. While Douglas was quick to point out the inconsistency in his father’s employment history, at one point stating ironically that, “I’m sure there is some rationale behind my father’s life,” (Simpson, 2003, p.7) Douglas himself worked a multitude of unrelated jobs prior to his emergence as a successful author. (Gaiman, 2003, p.9)

Douglas’ experiences seem to have played at least as significant a role as biological factors in his development. According to Douglas, his desire to become an entertainer stemmed back to one night while watching The Frost Report, a British Satire which featured John Cleese. Douglas was struck by the tall comedian and later remarked that while watching he thought to himself. “I can do that! I’m as tall as he is!” (Gaiman, 2003, p.7) Douglas was well-known as a perfectionist. This trait could perhaps be partially explained by an anecdote that Douglas was fond of telling. According to him, whenever he would get writer’s block, which he admitted was anytime that he was writing, he would think back to a paper that he wrote for school at the age of ten, for which he received a ten out of ten, the only time that the instructor of the course ever gave a perfect mark. “In a way it gives me more of a boost than having sold a million copies of this or a million of that.” (Gaiman, 2003, p.7)

The humanistic theory of psychology addresses personality in terms of innate motivations to achieve the most that you can achieve, and a view of self, learned by interactions with others. (text, p.480) Douglas Adams began his career as a writer amidst much rejection and unhappiness. While he would write the most amazing works for submission to radio programs, he was continuously being told that they just weren’t right for the particular formats. Due to this rejection from peers, Douglas soon became depressed and convinced that he was a failure. Although his inner drive told him that he could “change the face of comedy” (Gaiman, 2003, p.13), by the age of 25 he was convinced that he would never earn any money by writing. (Gaiman, 2003, p.23)

The trait theory of psychology states that our personality can be explained by enduring patterns of behavior, or traits. (text, p. 476) When Douglas Adams is described, the description is invariably consistent with what others have said about him. In the forward to M.J. Simpson’s Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman sums up the majority of these traits. He states that Douglas was: gawky and coltish, kind funny and talkative, keen on computers and clumsy. Plugging this description into the big five personality traits, we can surmise that Douglas was high in the traits of neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness. His missed deadlines, which Webb described as “not quite an industry record, but impressive,” (Webb, 2003, p.6) would lead us to the conclusion that his conscientiousness was relatively low. Gaiman, in his own book, described Douglas as Solitary, which would leave us to assign the final personality trait in the big five as low also.

While both the humanistic and trait theories do much in illuminating the motivations and personality of Douglas Adams, I believe that it is easier to use trait theory to describe his personality. Although it is difficult to do so with absolute perfection, due to lack of complete information, and Adams’ wont to stretch the truth in tales about himself, through the use of trait theory we can at least begin to understand the man who while drunk on his back in a field somewhere, came up with a story to make us all feel a little less alone.

Paper Tease

Drunk, and lying in a field in Islington, Douglas Noel Adams, a relatively unknown writer/performer from Cambridge, England, was struck with an idea for a radio show that would eventually become a cult classic and the source of material for multiple books, a television series, and a soon to be released motion picture. This is not the story of that idea.

That's the beginning of my personality profile of Douglas Adams. Tomorrow maybe I'll post the whole crappy paper on my other site. It could have been a good paper. At one point it had serious potential. And then I started writing it. I was, as usual, constrained by time. I have to stop procrastinating. Just not today. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow too.

I only worry about the ones for which this makes sense

"It's really not what you've done in the past that determines who you are, but rather, how what you've done in the past has made you who you are." - michael moore, circa 2005, feeling a bit vague.

I don't normally go in for this sort of thing...

A friend of mine recently asked me for a quote from a book for some peculiar reason that I'm sure you wouldn't understand even if I could grasp it well enough to explain it to you, and while I don't normally go in for that sort of thing, I am, for equally inexplicable reasons, feeling uncharacteristically generous this morning, so I present you now with a quote from Douglas Noel Adams, taken from the playbill of a self-produced show which he co-wrote and performed while in school called Several Poor Players Strutting and Fretting. Thank you and enjoy.

"By the time you've read the opposite page (cast and credits) you'll probably be feeling restive and wondering when the show will start. Well, it should start at the exact moment that you read the first word of the next sentence. If it hasn't started yet, you're reading too fast. If it still hasn't started, you're reading much too fast, and we can recommend our own book 'How to Impair Your Reading Ability', written and published by Adams-Smith-Adams. With the aid of this slim volume, you will find that your reading powers shrink to practically nothing within a very short space of time. The more you read, the slower you get. Theoretically, you will never get to the end, which makes it the best value book you will ever have bought!" (taken without even the semblance of permission from Don't panic: Douglas Adams and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)

I apologize to those of you who had hoped to see a post by yours truly, and instead had to suffer through the eloquence of one of the greatest writers of English prose ever. I can assure you we will not have that sort of thing going on here in the future. As a matter of fact, starting tomorrow, all of my blog entries will be translated into baby talk prior to their being posted. Awwww, dat'll be a widdle annoying, don't you think? Yeees, yeeees it will. Yes it will. You got a poopie in your die-dey? Yeah? A poopie in your die-dey?

Unabashed Gleefulness

It's no great secret that I work at a library. More specifically, I work at the United States Naval Academy Library. Drop by anytime and we'll chat. Or Maybe I'll have security remove you. It's hard to say without meeting you first. But that's not the point. Today while I was working at the circulation desk of said library, a member of the United States Naval Academy Glee Club came up to me and said, "I'm a member of the Naval Academy Glee Club, and I'm showing member's of (fill in the blank with unmemorable school name)'s Glee Club around and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah"

And at this point I have to admit that I wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying anymore, but rather thinking to myself, "Well, gosh. If we could get all the members of the Academy's Glee Club, as well as all of the member's of this other school's Glee Club in here, well, that would sure be a heck of a lot of Glee."

And I guess the point I'm trying to make is, at what point should you stop and say, "There's just too much damn gleefulness in here."

And one final thought. Click on my link for this entry and then ponder this, "why exactly DON'T I have permission to access /Music/mensglee.html on this server?" My guess is you are not nearly gleeful enough.

Oh Those Wacky Brits

Leave it to the Brits to come up with a study showing emails to be more damaging to IQ than smoking pot. Apparently some crack team of British researchers has found that workers who over-actively check their email lose on average 10 points of IQ during the course of their workday. They contrasted this with the mere 4 point drop experienced immediately after smoking marijuana, and voila! We now have a new study, helpfully telling us something we probably all already knew in the first place.

You can’t really be too surprised that the Brits would take on such an important social issue as this one though. After all, it was the ever-perceptive Britons who spared no expense to be able to announce to the world first, and I know for a fact that there was stiff competition from a group of drunk Germans to be first to publish, unfortunately the Germans were waylaid at a tattoo parlor on their way to mail off their findings, seems a likeness of Underdog was found in the shop's window, and we all know how rare that is, but I may be moving away from my original point now, namely, that drinking beer made people seem more attractive.

I personally have conducted this same research on numerous occasions, without the benefit of any grant money being thrown my way, and would concur that most Brits become positively tolerable to look at once I’ve had a pint or two. Back to the Brits latest contribution to the academic world, I think we're all well aware of the fact that emails are making us dumber.

Do me a favor. Take a random email message in your inbox, copy and paste it into any word processing program that checks the grade level of the writing, and I'm sure you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Now it could be said that many people view email as equivalent to an oral conversation, and therefore write in a more relaxed style than they would, say, a doctoral dissertation, or a study on, oh I don’t know, maybe emails and pot.

The fact of the matter is that while speaking like an idiot has always been socially acceptable, and in my opinion should continue to be, I'm a big fan of the whole not thinking too much about what you say before you say it system of conversations, as anyone who has ever had the unfortunate privilege of speaking to me can attest, writing in the style of a ten year old was once frowned upon. Those enlightened times are long gone. I would go so far as to say that these days, the vast majority of what people read and write consists of fragmented thoughts, incorrectly constructed quasi-sentences, and simplistically stated, low-brow, pathetic tripe.

Of course, this trend is upsetting to practically no one you meet, as most of the people you meet don’t want to write well in the first place, and in the second place, probably prefer the illiterate society that we are cooperatively creating. So Brits, jolly good show mates! My question to you is what are you planning to do with your findings?

I know that personally, I expect any emails received from the land of the Sex Pistols and spotted dick, to, from this day forth, be as well organized, thoughtfully constructed and intellectually stimulating as the rest of their contributions to the world of letters have been. And yes, here I’m thinking specifically of Benny Hill and Rowan Atkinson.

Continued slide into unshaven animal madness

Oh the depths to which I have sunk! The other day I remarked in a post on how my deteriorating appearance was frightening small, neighbor children. Unfortunately, I yet remain unshaven and I fear that I am losing all touch with humanity. Walking through my neighborhood the other day I could not help but notice how agitated my neighbors' dogs became when I passed them. The barking irritated me to what can only be described as an irrational degree, and I soon found myself running through the woods behind my house, tearing off my clothes and howling as I went. After that everything was a confused blur of violent images.

When I finally recovered a modicum of lucidity, I found myself in a pool of blood next to the carcass of a large deer. I wandered around for hours, ocasionally unrinating on trees that I passed. Eventually I found my way home and spent the rest of the day watching Animal Planet. Please God help me! I am attaching a picture of my current condition in an attempt to document my horrible transformation. Those of you with weak constitutions should avert your eyes now.

The ongoing saga of Captain Mike, scourge of the seven seas and lover of the ladies

Question: Why are pirates called pirates?

So anyway, today I had what I think might be a decent enough idea for a book. Of course I get these all the time, and they never amount to anything, so we'll just have to wait and see how this one turns out. I have felt a stronger than normal desire to write lately, but between work and fam and school and the ocassional night of drinking beer with either Lori or my classmates, I just don't have a lot of time that I can devote to writing. Not like I'm not writing anyway, between the pathetic displays of nonsense that I post on this blog, the updates to my OTHER site (I often wonder if my blog ever gets jealous of me talking about my other site as much as I do...), and my writing assignments for school, I'm actually producing more than at any other point in my life. So at least that's a positive trend. Oh well, I'm at work so I suppose I should go perform some mind-numbing task. But before I do I'll share with you a small slice of the pizza pie which is my life, My next classroom assignment is to do a personality profile on a famous historical figure, and I had fully intended to do mine on Douglas Noel Adams, longtime personal hero, we even share a birthday, but after much time spent shelving books in the pirates section of the library today, I've begun to change my mind and am now considering doing my profile on one of the great pirates. How cool would that be? I could even use the joke I found online the other day: Why are pirates called pirates? Answer: Because they ARRRRRRRR! LOLOLOLOL... Ahhh, I kill me.

All-time Great Decisions I've Made vol. 1

Last night, while faced with the impending deadline of an essay for my PSY 200 class, I made a wonderful decision. Instead of researching the material, maybe making an outline, or heaven forbid, actually starting the writing process itself, I accepted an invitation from my wife to hang out on our back porch and drink beer all night. Fast forward to this morning and in addition to having a slight hangover, I have accomplished absolutely nothing in regards to my homework assignment, which btw, is due in 8 hours. Meanwhile I have a full day at work ahead of me, and later I'll have to pick my son up from advanced band practice, leaving me maybe an hour and a half of free time to work on my essay. Oh well, at least instead of working on it right now I am composing this blog entry...

Habemus Papam

Today Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany became the 265th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He chose the name Benedict XVI. I used to go to a church named St Benedict's in Broken Arrow. Anyway, nothing goofy to say about any of this. Just thought I'd share the news for those of you living in a cave whose only source of current events happens to be my blog. How pathetic are you? BTW, in case you hadn't heard about this either, the Red Sox defeated the Yankees to advance to the World Series last season, only to be defeated by the St Louis Cardinals in 4 games. It was all very sad for Red Sox fans. And that's the news for Tuesday, April 19th. I now return you to your regularly scheduled barage of nigh-incomprehensible ranting.

Not quite a deep thought.

"God actually intended for us to walk on the grass. That's why he put it on top of the ground." - michael moore, circa 2005.

My least meaningful post to date.

Dear Diary,

I really need to shave. The hairs above my upper lip are starting to interfere with the food that I shove into my piehole. Did you ever see the movie "Anchorman", diary? It was a good movie. At one point Will licks his upper lip and says something about the yummy ribs he had for lunch. That is what I am becoming. A monster. A freak. Today as I was driving to work I saw one of the neighbor kids pointing at me with an excited look on his face, and then, as I drove closer he began to clutch his mother's leg and cry violently. Oh dear God what have I become?! A furry, Bar-B-Q sauce retaining monster! I must find a way out of this downward spiral! Maybe I'll shave tomorrow. That's all for today diary. xoxo

M.

And in the highest tradition of the non sequit(u)r - Lemons!

The other day I went to a Chinese restaurant and received the strangest fortune cookie. It said: "Growling boys lurking underneath your window are most likely rehearsing a play." I still don't know what that means.

Lather, rinse, repeat(optional)

Sit at desk. Grab pile of paper. Lift a paper from atop the pile (or actually, grabbing from anywhere else within the pile works just as well.) Unfold the paper. Sort the paper into new, smaller piles. Count the papers in each of the new piles. Enter data from the paper count into the computer. Repeat 28,000,000,000,000 times. Ram head into brick wall. Combine small piles of paper back into one pile. Put a rubber band around the pile. Place a sticky note on the top paper in the pile. Write "Week 2, April" on said sticky note. Go home and contemplate a pleasant way to end all of this tragically. Congratulations! You've just been trained to be a Library Technician at the United States Naval Academy. The ramming your head into the brick wall part is of course optional.

Frustrated musing on the futility of life. Mine moreso than yours.

I wanted to write a book. I’ve always wanted to write a book, for as long as I can remember, longer actually, because I don’t really remember very much. My only problem was I could never decide what I could write about. I’ve never felt comfortable with writing about people my own age. For one thing I haven’t been at my own age long enough to feel like an expert on it. I’ve never felt qualified to write about people older than me either, seeing as how I've NEVER been at their age. As far as writing about people who are younger than me, well, that’s no good either, since, like I said, I really don’t remember very much. So there's a problem there somewhere. A conundrum if you will. Even if you won't, because this really isn't about you see, it's about me. And my inability to write intelligently on you and people like you. So maybe it is about you. You bastard. Why won't you make yourself easier to write about? Maybe if you were more one-dimensional and goverened by more simplistic motivations. Work with me here. Ok, I've complained enough for today's post. Maybe I should change my blog's name to "Underdeveloped Bitching."

Feel free to ignore this.

I'm not really posting twice in one day. I just had to share something real quick. Give me one second of your time and then feel free to get back to your life, which is much more exciting than mine I'm sure, I mean, I'm sitting here typing about a goofy thought that ocurred, and this is probably going to be one of the high points of my day. So anyway, let's get this over with. I was just reading over my last post, checking for typos, semblance to coherency, possible applicability to the furtherence of the understanding of the meaning of life and whatnot, and I thought to myself, "How pithy am I now, bitch?" And that made me laugh. That's all. It's not even my sentiment really. The pithy thing I stole from Bill-o-Reilly, a rather stolid Irish boy with a superiority complex, and the ending of the sentence in "bitch" thing I stole from Dave Chapelle, a sassy young black man with a penchant for the chronic, as well as a propensity for appending sentences with bitch. Also, I may have borrowed "sassy" from a friend of mine, one Miss Parker. So if practically none of the above content is directly attributable to me, why did I feel inclined to post it? Now that is a truly good question...

Early morning venting

All this week I've been scheduled to be in at work at 6:30 in the morning. Which really sucks. What kind of world do we live in where people are supposed to be working already by 6:30 in the morning? I mean, farmers I can understand. They have to go around grabbing cow teats, and I suppose that is easier when the cows are still a bit groggy. I know my wife complains about it less when she's still half asleep. But I'm dangerously close to digressing. Scheduled to be in at 6:30. Of course I never actually make it in by 6:30, but still, the fact that by 6:31 in the a.m. I am already late for something is fairly depressing. It's like the Van Halen "Hot for Teacher" video where the kid says "I don't FEEL tardy." How in the world can you be late for anything at 6:31 in the morning? It's just not natural.