Ten

This was taken when I was 5. I wasn't so cute when I was 10.

I found this whilst fishing around in my old school books. It was an exercise undertaken on the 6th September 1998, where I was required to describe myself. Looking back, it tells me more about myself than I could have ever imagined.

"My name is Sophie Wilkinson, I am 10 years old, I am a girl. and I go to Blackheath High school. My mum is called Mandy Hitchcock, and she used to be called Amanda jane Speigel, she is weird nice and funny. My dad is called Roger Wilkinson, he is very clever and always knows everything about anything. My eldest sister is called Sarah Hitchcock, she is 18, she is tall and skinny. My elder sister is called Laura Hitchcock, she is 14, but all her friends are 16 15 and ver, so she behaves like a 17 19 year old. My best friendsi Friends are my cat, Max (Catsuny Catzunjuma 7 13* 9 Sammy Samantha Hawkins, 10. and basicly everybody!

I am tall medium have got and average height of 144cm (4'9") and a weight of 5 and 33kg (5 1/2 stone) or 66 pounds) I have never had a broken bone. (except from breaking my teeth), and I have never had illnesses except chickenpox, bronchitis and the common cold. I have ginger, shoulder-length hair, brown grey eyes, a forever changing nose, as last year it flicked up like a ski slop, but now it has le elongated, and calmed down a bit at the end of it. my m My mouth is quite small except I can grin halfway fromear to ear. I am quite funny, as I can put my hair up and look like one person, and put my hair down and look like another!

I am a can be very critical sometimes and then I could be fun-loving another time. I sometimes think very hard about why I am here, in this body, with the this these legs, and those eyes, which always leads onto the meaning of life, and what job we are meant to do here on this planet, and where the universe ends. I hink that, past the universe, is reancartion of everybody, and, we would all be free of war, and disease and death, but I have only one querry about this, as if there werent any of the latter, we would be bored out of our skulls. I do not belive in one religion, I belive in several."

Dystopia

I decided to read the four most influential dystopia books of the 20th century all at once:

1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale. All have their merits. All are depressing, but the tragedies of each of them: government-sanctioned oppression, rape and murder, the loss of intellectual debate and discourse, are all the more convincing when the dystopia created is coherent and structured.

The harsh regimes are scariest when the author describes them as meticulously crafted, or created from (misunderstood) logic or misinterpreted verses. Most of the order in each story is about keeping people within certain social tiers and also ensuring reproduction is done accordingly. Eugenics is a common theme of the novels, even if only faintly so in the case of Fahrenheit 451. With the exception of Brave New World, which eerily foresees Nazi ideals, all of the books were written after the Holocaust. To me, the scariest part of the Holocaust was that, in the early 1930's, Germany was technologically advanced. To Hitler and his followers, who democratically elected him, the final solution wasn't a last resort, it was a culmination of the industrial revolution. Hundreds of years of scientific enterprise and human achievement were being used to systematically destroy millions of people. We can create gadgets, machines and all sorts of electrical devices, but we're still violent savages.

Echoes of this sentiment are present throughout all of the books, but each focus on more specific elements: The Handmaid's Tale is concerned with sexism whereas 1984 is occupied with restrictions upon privacy and freedom of surveillance. But this factor should not demarcate which book is more relevant. If I've learned anything from these books, it's that when a specific demographic is oppressed, the whole community, even those outside of those being directly oppressed, is oppressed.

ENTP

When I'm feeling a little wayward, I turn to a higher being. Like astrology. I definitely believe that your star sign affects your behaviour, but I cannot prove this in any way, shape or form. When people question my (often hidden) appreciation for astrology, I mumble something along the lines of 'Well, planets have magnetic pulls on other planets and that must affect the neurons in your brain as you are gestating...' It's all codswallop, though. I know this. More often than not, a horoscope's content is structured like spaghetti. With an egg in, to bind it. And some glue. And stickers. You either must work hard to entangle its meanings, or condemn yourself to forgetting what Justin Toper has to say about you and the millions of other people who share the arbitrary 29 day window you were born within. Maybe horoscopes are made to be so confusing that you must subconsciously project your own anxieties onto the words you are not understanding. So that instead of reading generalised waffle, you end up personalising your horoscope. Your interpretation is key to how you're going to behave today. We must waste a lot of time and money on the presumed necessity of an authoritarian figure telling us what to do. Especially when this figure isn't even doing the work, instead serving as a mirror by which we may vicariously instruct ourselves. Maybe horoscopes are made to be so confusing that the reader ends up feeling guilty and woeful after wasting time and money reading the indecipherable blurb, and thus begins a cycle of self-loathing that can only help to stimulate more money into the pockets of THE MAN.

Due to working on minimum wage, the cold weather and a lack of true independence, I'm feeling a bit wayward, so I've turned to Jung. I don't know much of what he's said and done, by any means, apart from have some involvement in the Myers-Briggs typology charts. Now that I understand I am definitely an ENTP (Extrovert, iNtuitive, Thinking Perciever), I have a better idea of who I am and how I best work. I was going to sit down to a psychometric test, but I think this gives me a better idea of what to do in the future. If you're feeling a bit lost, wayward, in need of some definition, or just incredibly bored, have a google of 'Myers-Briggs' and see what you are.

Interestingly enough, ENTPs make for great psychologists.