Social media is not real life, social media is not real life, I tell myself during my lunch break one random Tuesday afternoon, as I briefly scroll through my Instagram feed filled with posts from old college friends, acquaintances, classmates and enemies who all seem to be on vacation at the exact same time at pretty much the exact same places: Düsseldorf, Dubai, a random In-N-Out location in San Diego--to name a few famous spots.
Whatever, I say in my mind, as I bite into my second grilled ham and cheese sandwich of the week. Who needs to visit the Burj Khalifa or order a burger off the Not-So-Secret-Menu to go with their chocolate shake? Not this editor! Trust me, I don’t envy the folks choosing to suffer in 100॰F weather just to go desert surfing in the Middle East–we have plenty of scalding sunshine to go around here, although I could go for a quality cheeseburger. (Yes, I know all about the existence of Five Guys, but in the interest of fairness, I can’t say with absolute certainty that Five Guys is the best without trying In-N-Out first. But I do love the shakes at Five Guys.)
INFJ
If you feel like you’ve outgrown horoscope readings in Cosmopolitan but still want your daily fix of pseudoscience, I highly recommend you take the Myers-Briggs personality test. Loosely based on Jungian theories on psychology, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test initially developed by mother-daughter duo Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers that aims to categorize people into one of sixteen distinct personality types. If you think that sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is: despite the test’s widespread adoption in places like corporate leadership seminars and BuzzFeed quizzes, many serious thinkers discredit MBTI because it appears to rely on the Barnum effect–where people taking the quiz will whole-heartedly choose to believe descriptions that supposedly apply to them alone in particular, but are in fact so vague that they can literally fit anyone.
Anyways, I wasted 15 minutes of my life this week and took the first MBTI test I found online and it told me that I’m an INFJ, which here means “the Advocate”, according to 16personalities.com. INFJs, according to the website, “tend to approach life with deep thoughtfulness and imagination. Their inner vision, personal values, and a quiet, principled version of humanism guide them in all things.” Sounds pretty neat, I’ll take it.
SXSW (Airlines)
If you’re anything like me, an obsessive lover of public affairs programming, you may have seen on C-SPAN this past month that the CEO of Boeing, Dave Calhoun, testified before Congress regarding the safety (or lack thereof) of their commercial planes. The official title the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations gave the hearing was “Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture”, but personally, I think it should have been named “PLEASE, Sir, Why On God’s GREEN EARTH Did That Plane’s Door Just YEET Itself Off 20,000 Feet In The Air?” (Re: Alaska Airlines) On a more serious note, this debacle is just plain (excuse the pun) awful and heartbreaking. Between 2018 and 2019, faulty Boeing jets operating in Ethiopia and Indonesia crashed and killed a combined total of 346 people. (Lion Air, Ethiopian Airlines). If you would like to learn more, I highly recommend the Netflix documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing”, directed by Rory Kennedy.
As of this week, Boeing appears to be headed towards the plea deal route, where the company will plead guilty to fraud in order to avoid a lengthy public trial. But of course, the relatives of those killed in the plane crashes want much more than that, such as calling for Boeing officials to face charges.
I have nothing more to add on the matter, except I hope that justice is served and that federal agencies in charge of overseeing aviation do their job so that these types of tragedies can be avoided in the future.
Andrea Gutierrez is the editor of the Bryan County News.