This has to be one of the toughest ideas for me to practice – the idea of putting principles before personalities in my decisions and day-to-day interactions. Some personalities offend me. Some personalities annoy the shit out of me. And some just really tick me off. I’m sure there’s some psychological explanation involving mirrors and teachers and blah, blah, blah…

Where does personality end and personal character begin? When I stand up to a bully, am I rebelling against his personality, or am I defending my own principles? It’s one of those fine-line things.

It takes a lot of things to make up an individual – physical characteristics, values, ideas, smarts, character, personality, and… soul. Some would say we choose them all. Some would say certain attributes are luck of the draw or genetic or arise from environment.

It’s not cool to judge someone on his physical characteristics in our society, and in cyberspace, it’s less of an issue altogether. But, in the land of data-transfer, I tend to see more of a person’s personality than anything else. That’s why I always prefer to exchange emails for awhile on a dating website. I can glean a lot of information that way, and a guy’s personality is as important to me as my body proportions may be to the guy.

Is it prejudice to judge someone on his personality?

If we could figure out how to be as accepting of different personalities as we are of different faces, what would happen in this big ole world?

Hmm?