An Earful on Narcissism

It’s not everyday the Doc looks inside your left ear and says, “Wow!”
Wow? Wow what, Doc? I’m here for my RIGHT ear.
Your ear drum is really inflamed! says Doc. It’s really red!
And that’s exciting news…. why? I know: It’s exciting because I’m feeling the pain in my RIGHT ear, right? You’ve never seen that happen, right, Doc?
He hardly glanced in my right ear. It must be dull in there.

So, after learning the new diagnostic terminology of “Wow!” I received antibiotics to treat the phenomenon of pain zooming through my brain to be felt in the opposite ear. Maybe Doc will write me up for a medical journal. I will become the famous Patient C, studied by medical students for decades to come.

And I spent the night ooing and ahing over my amazing ear. No, I guess I really spent the night groaning and moaning, wishing there were an opium den next door. Alas, there is not, which is a good thing for an alcoholic like moi.

To self-treat the annoying situation of deafness in my left ear and pain in my right ear, I opened my email. I found a curious missive there, from a psychology researcher. She’s doing a project on the phenomenon of pain transferred through the brain from one ear to the other!

Not really. Her name is Katy, and she addressed me as “Dear Blogger.” I’m a random contact for a research project about the personality of bloggers.
Katy says, “I am a doctoral student in the psychology department at the University of Texas at Arlington. I am completing my dissertation research on the topic of the personality characteristics of bloggers. One of my goals for this study is to contact actual bloggers and record their self-reported personality traits, and view information posted to their blogs.”

Well, I figure if I can’t be the famous Patient C, I might as well be the famous Blogger A. As a lifelong journalist, I love to research topics, and I thought, why not do a favor for a fellow researcher? So I checked out Katy’s credentials and then participated in her study questionnaire.

It consisted of the expected stuff like “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements: I feel more alive online than I do in real life. I like to look at myself in the mirror. People view me as the It Girl of blogging.” And so on. It was easy to choose my answers (nope, nope, nope).

Then I came to this one: I am more capable than others. Wow! as my Doc would say. In certain useless situations, like knowing what’s what with English grammar, I am more capable than the average bear. But in other situations, like diagnosing my ear trouble, I am a complete dolt. After much back and forthing, I said I agree, but I thought: This one is going to mess up my whole personality profile.

And at the end of the questionnaire, I learned my qualms were justified. One of the things the study was going to discover was whether or not I have “Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a condition in which there is an inflated sense of self-importance and an extreme preoccupation with one's self.” Uh-oh.

These are some symptoms (which I googled to find): Has feelings of self-importance; Exaggerates achievements and talents; Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love; Has obsessive self-interest; Pursues mainly selfish goals…

Now, not only do I have a weird ear thing going on, but I am also doomed to being Blogger A who suffers an acute case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I’m going to skew Katy’s research study and make a bad name for bloggers everywhere.
As my Doc would say, “Wow!”

If you’d like to do your part for bloggers everywhere, you can take part in Katy’s questionnaire here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L7M59GV or contact her here: Katy Rollings at rollings.research@gmail.com.

But you have to forget everything I just said, and please eat this post, because we don't want it to get out to the general public. Or to the specific public either. I promised Katy we wouldn't cheat, okay?

*****