First, a favorite snippet from Philip Roth’s novella, Goodbye, Columbus, about an aimless young man from the Bronx and his ill-fated romance with a Jewish princess from Westchester County:

Neil:  How can I make you understand?  You want to know what my plans are for the future – I’m not planning anything.  Besides, I’m not a planner, I’m a liver.

Brenda:  I’m a pancreas.

Hey, I’m a liver, too (otherwise known as an INFP), and proud of it!  Along with Michael Rogers, odetteroulette, Will Humes, inchkachka, Joat, Black Bart and Paris Pace, among, I suspect, a handful of others here at OS. The heck with you pancreases, I say, here’s to the livers of the world!  Life is too short for balancing checkbooks and organizing sock drawers – we’ve got more important things to put off doing!

(For those of you scratching your heads, INFP is one of several personality types measured by the Meyers-Briggs Personality Indicator, a widely used questionnaire, based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types, that categorizes people along four different preference scales:  introvert vs. extrovert, concrete facts vs. intuition, head vs. heart, and organized and orderly vs. flexible and adaptive, better known around our house as sloppy and disorganized)     

As many of you know, Dorinda Fox ran a recent post delving into the notion that INFJs (introverted, intuitive, feeling, orderly types) make up a significant portion of the OS community, a theory that was confirmed by informal tally.  According to the results, INFJs here outnumber INFPs more than 4-to-1, a frightening prospect when you consider the fact that Js, with their organized, methodical approach to the task at hand, are generally far more productive than Ps, who tend to meander their way through life, not to mention cyberspace, a medium that is fatal to anyone with a propensity towards aimless wandering, as any INFP can attest.  How many of us have logged on at 8 a.m. for a quick check of the inbox only to emerge seven or even twelve hours later, with nothing to show for our time but a stiff neck and an ever-expanding library of knowledge on the lives of Lea Lane, Lisa Kern, Greg Thomas, Sandra Miller and all those other over-achieving Js out there.   

Not to single out anyone in particular here.  It’s just that we INFPs are what you might call the slacker cousins of those nose-to-the-grindstone INFJs.  Like our cousins, we’re introverted, intuitive and introspective, but unlike them, we have trouble sorting through the jumble on our desks, let alone the chaos that’s cluttering up our heads.  Day after day, before I’ve even had a chance to finish last week’s dishes and turn a few rough notes into something mildly coherent, my friends on the “J” side of the aisle continue to crank out one meticulously crafted post after another, threatening to bury Ps like myself in an avalanche of productivity.  I’m starting to feel like Lucy at the chocolate factory, devouring short essays like bon-bons as they zoom past on the OS assembly line, and I spend so much time commenting, it may be weeks before I manage to post again.  (And something tells me I’m not the only one around here who’s made a new year’s resolution to establish a more rigorous writing schedule, so I’m guessing matters will only get worse come Monday morning.)

With this in mind, I’m proposing an INFP support group, a kind of forum where INFPs can expound on the virtues of the unplanned life, complain about Js, discuss motor trips (Ps, in my observation, love nothing better than the open road), work out writing strategies or exchange secrets for getting week-old dried egg off a frying pan (my solution:  buy a new pan).  Naturally, we’ll meet when the spirit moves us, at a location yet to be determined.