Sometimes, you take a test because someone else suggested it. In this case, two different forms of the test lead to two different conclusions.

The first, from this test page

The analysis indicates that the author of http://notebuyer.livejournal.com is of the type:
INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

The second, from this page:

Idealist Portrait of the Counselor (INFJ)

Counselors have an exceptionally strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others, and find great personal fulfillment interacting with people, nurturing their personal development, guiding them to realize their human potential. Although they are happy working at jobs (such as writing) that require solitude and close attention, Counselors do quite well with individuals or groups of people, provided that the personal interactions are not superficial, and that they find some quiet, private time every now and then to recharge their batteries. Counselors are both kind and positive in their handling of others; they are great listeners and seem naturally interested in helping people with their personal problems. Not usually visible leaders, Counselors prefer to work intensely with those close to them, especially on a one-to-one basis, quietly exerting their influence behind the scenes.

Counselors are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, and can be hard to get to know, since they tend not to share their innermost thoughts or their powerful emotional reactions except with their loved ones. They are highly private people, with an unusually rich, complicated inner life. Friends or colleagues who have known them for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that Counselors are flighty or scattered; they value their integrity a great deal, but they have mysterious, intricately woven personalities which sometimes puzzle even them.

Counselors tend to work effectively in organizations. They value staff harmony and make every effort to help an organization run smoothly and pleasantly. They understand and use human systems creatively, and are good at consulting and cooperating with others. As employees or employers, Counselors are concerned with people's feelings and are able to act as a barometer of the feelings within the organization.

Blessed with vivid imaginations, Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery in their everyday language. Their great talent for language-both written and spoken-is usually directed toward communicating with people in a personalized way. Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another's emotions or intentions - good or evil - even before that person is aware of them. Counselors themselves can seldom tell how they came to read others' feelings so keenly. This extreme sensitivity to others could very well be the basis of the Counselor's remarkable ability to experience a whole array of psychic phenomena.

The implicit contradictions between the two descriptions is probably an indication of the weakness of the testing mode: in the first, the blog is rated, in the second, I agree/disagree with 72 statements about myself. Another explanation, of course, is that I'm fooling myself about me, which may be a better explanation, but one which, to be true, I have to keep up, and so not investigate....

"I suppose it was my grandmother who said it first, but it stuck: "nothing is that important."

"I was young, but I heard it, and worked over it. "Nothing is important," I thought. "Is nothing more important than other things?" It semed to be in a category all by itself. So I decided to take it seriously, just like a philosopher. I thought of nothing. I wasn't, as they said, empty-headed -- the thought filled my waking hours, and arithmetic and grammar simply weren't that important, so I didn't bother.

"Never mind" said my mother, "nothing is that important." dismissing the teachers' complaints about me.

"As young men will, I fell in love, and got married, but after a couple of children, my wife had no time for me, and it took effort to keep it up, and I decided nothing was that important, and walked out. I take odd jobs and live on the county. The welfare office is the steadiest money I earn, but why should a job be important?

"Nothing is important.

"So I sit around and ask for a handout every now and again. It's not bad -- after all, nothing is that important.

"People seem awfully inconsistent to me. I had my goal set. I achieved the important thing in life: nothing. And yet they seem ungrateful for the effort. I suppose I should pity them.

"Got a cigarette?"

He appeared to be unsurprised by the speed at which I moved away once I realized that to him, nothing was more important than my comfort.... and not in a good way.

That was the question. I was talking to someone, taking notes on my pad, and the gentleman down the counter said, "Are you with TV?" There was hope in his face.

I said, "No, I write things for an online magazine. I just talk to people to get ideas. Is there anything you'd like to see in print?"

Crestfallen, he said, "No. I just wanted to know if you were with a TV show."

I guess only TV is real to some people. Maybe they have a simpler life than I.

What do you think?

She has no name, which is, perhaps, just as well.

A young man was ordering at the counter, and had finished placing his daughter's order, she holding his hand, when the woman, who had a question about something, walked up, grabbed his crotch (by the expression on his face, anyway), pushed him back and let go, still holding his daughter's hand, and leaned in to the clerk, asking her question. His free hand clenched and unclenched several times, and he looked down at his daughter, and said nothing, waiting for the woman to go away. When he stepped up to complete the order, you would have thought he was uninterrupted, other than his quick look behind him after he paid, which radiated contempt and anger for a split second, then was brought under control as he handed his daughter the number for the order.

He had dismissed her, as he would a badly trained dog, and restored his patience. His conversation with his daughter at their table appeared to be quiet and good natured.

Had he spoken or acted, it would have been the worse for him, not because he would have been wrong to do so, but because she was black and a woman, on two accounts not to be held to civilized behavior, apparently. A racist and cultural imperialist, I guess. What else could he be?

The parents who gathered in this auditorium were, by most standards, well off. They arrived in the elegance that goes with designer labels and studied casualness, their cell phones occasionally interrupting to remind us all that we had important neighbors. This was not, though, a shareholder's meeting, or a local political committee. No, they were sending their children to day camp for part of the summer, and the tenor of their questions showed a note of anxiety that did not easily blend with their carefully cultivated show of self-assurance.

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Many of us have seen the consequences of children raised with such care and concern, such tenderness: they don't grow up and form independent families. College admission directors refer to them as "teacups" -- capable of being used if carefully sheltered from any of the bumps of real life: the kind of child who has never had to pack their own bag, and who flies back home tearfully after their first experience of a roommate who isn't interested primarily in their welfare.

And these parents mean so well. Perhaps the most useful comment was that of Elizabeth, who said, "Everyone wants their child to have a good experience. But that's not reality. The right thing to do is manage your child's processing of his experiences, not the experiences themselves. You don't have any control over experiences: they will all skin knees, get bitten, and probably sprain an ankle. The point is to feed back their own experiences to them in a way that they can draw conclusions about what to do and avoid themselves." She may have a point.

He was wearing a gown from the dress up bin when I walked into the room, and, after a blank look at me, he simply took off the clothes he was wearing and began to play with blocks, and set things up for another kid who was knocking them down with a block on a string. Soon after, another boy came to sit down beside him and talk, and his expression became calmer as he listened and responded to his new interlocutor.

A future sex maniac? An exhibitionist? Prey to the perverts in the making? Well, possibly. However, in this case, just a kid who wanted someone in the overcrowded daycare to pay attention to him, and who was willing to do anything to get there: the type of person dedicated to a task, and willing to experiment with anything to get results. In other words, a model employee.

Torts, not named after cakes, that was the subject. The professor's question?

"Suppose we have a young man who fancies himself as a bit of a Don Juan, making propositions to women in the coffeeshop. Can one of the other patrons sue the shop for creating a hostile environment?"

First response, from an earnest looking student: "I'm offended that you would use a Latino stereotype in your example."

The professor paused a moment. Then, speaking in a crescendo, said, "Your offense is not worth paying attention to. The fact that you have wasted your undergraduate education where the humanities were not taught and you never read "The Guest of Stone" -- that would be worth paying attention to if you needed a good education in law school. Evidently, you have concluded that you do not. I am not here to argue the point with you: though I will doubtless mention it to the Dean of Admissions. I, on the other hand, have been gravely offended by your shameless ignorance, and I will not pay attention to that either. I will pay attention to the fact that you have not addressed the question. You would find it profitable to read the cases in the textbook before the next class. The student on your right may take a turn: do I need to repeat the question?"

In response to the emails asking, "How do you do that pen portrait thing?" I'm giving in.

Pen portraits are supposed to be:
1. Short
2. Fairly anonymous: you can use people's first names, but don't include contact information or last names: if someone recognizes it, they already know them (and you have a really, really good portrait).
3. Should be based on some conversation and observation of the person you are describing.
4. Should have a point of view, so it is a coherent description (if you're conflicted, say why; rather than presenting both sides, take one).
5. Should key off of one thing you observed in either the person or the situation they were involved in.

This came from a composition exercise in high school (some days I WAS paying attention, really).

I'm not sure of websites that do this, though I like this description from here:An informal description of a person or group of people - this may cover age and other 'hard' variables, but will focus on softer dimensions such as attitudes, appearance and lifestyle. This may be part of the outcome of a piece of qualitative research (see 'typology') or may be used to help recruit the right participants for a project. For example, in the latter case, a pen portrait could describe 'the kind of music-mad kids you see hanging around record shops on Saturdays', as well as asking for specific age and usership criteria to be met.

I have seen examples which sound like resumes without the formatting, humorless, dull bragging, and I've seen lighter ones that capture a mood, a spirit, or a tendency in an interesting, occasionally enchanting, way.

Care to try your own hand at it in your own journals? Just make the tag "pen portrait" and I'll find it.

She stands in front of a supermarket, beside sacks of her belongings. She says not a word to those who pass by, and she holds a mirror in one hand, two inches from her face, and a tweezer in the other. Neither moves for the fifteen minutes I have before I have to go to an appointment. Her gaze is intense, her brow furrowed in concentration, her face tanned and her eyebrows do not look plucked into shape, though I am hardly an expert.

There within that mirror she has all the world she cares to deal with at the moment. It does not include where she stands, who speaks to her, or any moment but the present, and that fills all her wishes. It is not the gaze of Narcissus, as revealed by the tweezers: but given their inactivity in the face of such scrutiny, it might be related. She has no time for those who would praise her or criticize her: their speech is irrelevant, just twittering in the background.

In the face of that determination, I can't resist speaking anyway, knowing that it will be ignored like everything else: "Look up a little, dear. There are more wonders around you than you are paying attention to, and the setting sun colors the hills in warm, rose-colored glasses just for you to see."

That's not a title, it's a description. The described, in this case, was a woman who had stepped into a grocery store for some milk for her little girl after the sun had set, and had the bad judgement to think that parking in a fire lane next to the store would make it faster. It was that placement that caught the eye of a local policeman, who promptly zoomed in, lights flashing, walked around the car trying the doors to the distress of the little girl, and who waited the two minutes it took for the woman to come out again behind the car, seething.

When she returned, it was to hear the policeman say that not only would she get a ticket for parking in a fire lane, he was calling child protective services to pick up her daughter, who had been endangered by locking her in a car, and that she was going to jail. That was the face of fear: a woman who had made a mistake, and a policeman in the evening who was determined to make her pay for inconveniencing him. It didn't matter that the law about locking children in cars had been enacted in response to deaths in hot weather, and that this cool evening it would be better to be in a warm car; he had his laws, and that was enough. She would learn better than to make him wait for her. He kept his flashlight in her eyes while asking if she were drunk, or high, and then, ludicrously enough, asking why she was nervous. (As if it weren't obvious: she had just been threatened with the loss of her daughter, her freedom, and probably her job -- if she were calm and self-possessed in such a moment, she might have been high.)

This played out for a half hour, with him writing and making calls in his car, getting her to sign things without letting her read them (not that, with the light in her eyes she could), and culminated in a declaration that she would go to court in January for the fire lane violation and child protective services would investigate her and see if they could take her daughter. Was this the best way to handle things? No, but it was the way a frustrated policeman got to take out his anger on someone who could not argue back. I'm a little worried about his wife, myself.

Crossposted to Las Vegas

His name is Michael, and he is sixteen years old, of slight build, on a playground in Summerlin. He is waiting for high school to get out, and asking adults he sees for the time.

Michael is bored, bored enough to play games with a three-year old, and bored enough to talk to me. He has a lazy smile, and the slow movements of someone who still has some growing to do. His mother kicked him out of the house last night, saying he should get his own apartment and own job: she found out he got a girl pregnant. I don't ask about her: he's got a name written on his shoes and his jeans, in the manner of a student who isn't paying attention. His pride in the fact shines through the story he's telling: it means he had sex, and that was status, worth any price in time and trouble.

He doesn't understand why his mother is so uncaring, and feels sorry for himself for being so put upon -- the girl wants to break up, but he expects the baby to live with him, in a cheap apartment of Paradise Road, while he works at McDonald's. Somehow, he's hoping for a boy, since girls seem too hard to figure out. He expects to use the bus or walk to get to where he needs to go.

It hasn't occurred to him yet that there are holes in this fantasy of his, and that he might not have the endurance to paper them over.

Michael collects his jacket and starts walking toward the high school, a young man going places.

Walk carefully, Michael. Las Vegas is pretty hard on anyone who can't control their desires, and you are not the exception to that rule. Consequences are all around, and you don't have the mental equipment to anticipate them. Listen to people a bit: pride is not your friend.

"I'm a ladies' man, you know, not a man's man. Brought up that way." he said, by way of introduction, after we'd placed our order. I listen to people: one of my few skills.

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He talked about a few other things, like how to keep a woman happy, but I suspect this is the wrong forum for graphic details and marital speculations.

Welcome to Las Vegas, sir. A former boytoy fits in here as well as anyone else: you can relax.