The Secret: I've Categorized You All

I’ll let you in on a little secret here for the first time ever. I categorize everyone on this site before I’ve read past one blog entry. It’s really not unheard of. In fact, I bet 50 points off of my total points on this blog that you do this yourself.

You can categorize in any aspect of life, but I suppose school, work, and this site are three very good examples.

In middle school I began noticing the cliques--you know, the groups of people that just seem to fit together. There’s some common element that combines them. You’ve got the Populars--they’re usually the talkative, outgoing ones. They’ve got a nice swath of friends orbiting them and seem to run the school with an icy hard grip. Geeks/Nerds change roles depending what area you live in, but technically these are the more technologically savvy individuals. They spend free time on the computer. The Quiet Ones, which can often become the ever-vague Weird Ones may be those students who read all the time, don’t talk much, and have few extra curriculars. I could of course mention Jocks, Goths, or Brain Surgeons, but you are already all too familiar with this breakdown of school life.

Depending on where you might work depends on how you categorize your customers or fellow employees, but for the sake of keeping this blog entry a few words short of book length I shall keep this pretty general. For customers, you could have good, bad, or indifferent. Good customers tip their waitresses, don’t complain, and speak kindly to workers. Bad customers don’t tip well (or at all), find anything to complain about, and usually accompany this with a bad attitude. Indifferent customers are just neutral.

Now we’ve gotten to the part where I explain the categories of Progressive U bloggers. See if you can find what category you’re in.

Pretty much every blogger I’ve come across will fit into a category after a short period of time. I can usually tell right off the bat when a blogger signs on whether or not they’ll quit the contest by the end of the week (Passing Fancy/Couldn‘t-Care-Less). I’ve been eerily accurate so far. Then, we’ve got the exact opposite, the cream of the crop you might say, who have no issue determining what’s a progressive issue and can discuss such with great ease and create an entertaining blog to boot. I’m jealous of these ones, I admit it. There are others who struggle a little at first getting their blogs to top quality, but after some direction (or maybe is it just plain ol’ practice?) they become one of what I call in my head “The Greats of Progressive U”. That’s right, some of you definitely fall into the “Great” category. Then we’ve got the Cheaters, who make this place less fun. They also go by other names, like the One-Star-Rating-Bandit and the Illegal-Commenter (Okay, just made that up). Yet another category of bloggers fall into that So-and-So place--not the best blogs, they improve a tiny bit in the beginning, but eventually they just drop off the proverbial map after a couple weeks.

I apologize for all this being too general, but like I said before I can’t have this blog going on forever right?

The purpose of this blog was not to persecute me--or any other blogger who categorizes like I do. In fact, it’s to point out a connection I made from this random thinking…and psychology.

In Psychology, which explains a lot going on in those brains of ours, there is an explanation of how we think. There is one thing that stuck in my mind (and I can’t check back for facts because my friend never returned my textbook), but there’s a way that we remember things. We place things into categories, or schemas, so we can easily recall these things. Vehicles could be a schema, then we fit cars, boats, and bikes into that category. They are all machines that help us move about. So when we think of people, and start seeing familiar traits, they too become categorized so we can easily understand society. The Losers, the Successes….they’re all just people, but we label them all the same. And maybe--just maybe, don’t get too excited, now--that technique of labeling isn’t totally our fault.