Back in the times of geekery, there existed a recreational activity known as Role-Playing Games.  Interestingly enough, role-playing, or at least a form of this activity, was used fairly liberally throughout my education in Psychology. 
            One of the premises of role-playing games is that everyone has a moral alignment that will determine how they act and react in any given situation.  In the game form, these alignments broke down into terms of good, evil, and that most elusive of all alignments: neutral. 
            In real life, the goodness, evilness, and neuturalness of people is a little harder to peg down in such definitive terms.  In psychology, we learn different types of alignments.  This was something I learned at the end of High School as we were all required to take a personality test.  Some people are goal-oriented while others are people-oriented.  It’s a matter of priority.  Those folk who are goal oriented will always defer to their goals rather than to relationships.  These people aren’t necessarily friendless jerks who are utterly career minded, but they WILL tend to have a harder time figuring out other people than they do how to accomplish a task they have assigned themselves.
            At times, the goal-oriented fool will even make people their goal.  Gaining the affection of some fair lass, for instance, or putting their son through school.  This may be motivated partially out of selfishness, as are most human actions.  People-oriented people will do things out of selfishness, too.  They can read people very well.  They are usually good at manipulating people and their emotions, and can sometimes be attention seekers desirous of being liked by everyone. 
            I really don’t remember how I scored on the personality test in High School.  I am generally very bad at personality tests, partially because I can see their agenda pretty quickly and then I am conflicted between giving honest answers that reveal those things I don’t particularly like about myself, or giving the test the answers it wants in order to make myself appear to be better than I am.  Whatever my score, a long life of experience has given me the impression that I must be goal oriented.  Imagine my disappointment to learn that I take more after my mother than my father. 
            The most difficult part of being goal oriented is that I frequently don’t pay close attention to the people around me being all preoccupied and what-not with those agendas and such that I have running about.  This, I am here to profess, does not make you popular with those folk near and dear to your heart.  For some reason, people WANT you to pay attention to them, and when you put them aside for, say, laundry, they feel demeaned.  Well tough, people.  My mother always put aside MY needs and desires for housework.  I clearly turned out just fine.

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