There’s the Myers-Briggs test, the Jungian archetypes, the Japanese with their blood types and the astrologically inclined with their zodiac signs. These are all ways of putting people into classifications of one kind or another, to see which boxes they check and use this as a means of understanding their personalities. These taxonomies are useful for some in their attempts to easily judge books by their covers (or perhaps by their tables of contents). But I’ve got a new one: the buffet approach – comparably empirical but a lot more fun!

When you’re at a buffet, do you take a little of everything for the first round, then go back for bigger helpings of the dishes you liked best? Or do you browse at first, automatically writing off the red stuff for its overt similarity to a vegan rump roast and skipping the crunchy stuff for its unrecognizable position on the food chain? Or do you phase through it, bit by bit, going back for the things you’ve not yet tried? In my highly rudimentary and anthropologically unqualified analysis, I’d be willing to take your “buffet approach” as a proxy for your “approach to life.”

There are the grazers, particular and self assured. Then there are the nibblers, shy, disciplined and unimposing. And at the other extreme you have the all-out face-stuffers, decadent adventurists for whom a plate’s inadequacy of surface area is just another reminder of the fact that there aren’t enough hours in a day. Of course there would be the combo personalities, like the high-piling sharers, ambitious enough to stack up the sweets yet self-restrained and manipulative enough to make their partner eat the rest. Or the serial nibblers, philosophically conservative yet constitutionally indulgent. I’m telling you, this could be the new Rorschach test. Continue reading →