Thursday, August 30, 2007

Quiz time...

There's Not a Violent Bone in Your Body

You're cool and collected, even when someone really gets under your skin.
And while you don't blow up when you're angry, you know how to express your anger calmly.
You don't bottle emotions up or let them get out of control. For you, violence would never be an option.


I sure hope this is accurate.

I can honestly say that I have never hit anyone in anger. The only physical fight I've ever been involved in was in between tap and ballet classes at dance school when I was in about fifth grade, and that consisted of Evelyn Gruen clocking me on the side of the head with her Ballet Box (the carrier for her dance shoes) and then running away. I still don't know what made her so mad at me. And I can't say that I wouldn't have fought back if she had stayed put, but I was so stunned that all I could do was stand there and watch her run. The weird thing about it all was that we never got along in dance school, but we went to the same school in junior high and while we weren't really friends, we were friendly.

Just one of life's little mysteries, I guess.

Another thought that this quiz brings up is the fact that I've never really understood the resort to violence. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Especially in this day and age when it seems like more and more people, almost as a first response to getting angry or frustrated, go out and kill a few (or a lot of) people. I'm talking about terrorism (of all stripes and from all points on the political and religious spectrum, because it isn't just adherents of Islam, folks), but I'm also talking about "going postal" in the workplace, going on shooting sprees at school or in random public places, and the people who decided that it is just a wonderful idea to get back at an estranged or ex-spouse by killing the kids, or the spouse and the kids, or the spouse and the kids and then him or herself.

Really. What is up with that? Maybe I'm just old fashioned. Or old. Or really, really naive. Or maybe it's my upbringing. There was no "domestic violence" in my house growing up. Heck, there wasn't even any yelling or name-calling. Yeah, I got a swat on the butt a couple of times, but it wasn't meant to hurt, just to get my attention when I was off in "I'm-the-center-of-the-universe-land". But my parents didn't fight. They didn't yell at me or at each other. A friend once told me, when I explained all this to her, that she felt sorry for me because I had never developed any defenses against what she called the "real world". But violence and verbal abuse wasn't used and wasn't approved of in my family. We had a neighbor who was abusive to his family when he was drunk - and he was drunk a lot - and he was used (quite without his knowledge) as an object lesson in how one doesn't conduct themselves in their relations with others. I could never understand why that neighbor did that, and I still don't understand it, and I guess maybe I'm glad that I don't. Because I think that if I understood it, I might be more likely to be susceptible to it.

Which, apparently, according to the quiz, I'm not.

Thanks, by the way, to Sister Susan Rose over at Musings of a Discerning Woman for pointing out this quiz. She got the same result as I did, by the way.

1 comment:

Kris said...

I think that quiz has multiple personalities...it says you could never be violent yet has a link that says "could you be violent?" under it. Hehe...talk about an indecisive quiz! I might have to try it...

K.