self-monitoring scales

    There are several ways to find out if you are a high self-monitor or a low self-monitor. There's drawing a capital E on your forehead, of course. If your frame of reference is inside your head (low self-monitor), you'll draw it backwards from the perspective of the rest of the world. And if your frame of reference is the point of view of others (high self-monitor), you'll draw them a nice, legible E. Or, if you ever find yourself in a room that's built to be tilted and scientists ask you to hang a painting straight (they provide the painting), as a low self-monitor you will hang it according to your sense of what straight feels like, in reference to your own sense of relation to the earth; high self-monitors want the painting to match the off-kilter room.
     Something like that. I am less clear on the details of the painting-hanging test, never having had the opportunity to hang a painting, upon the request of scientists, in a tilted room. I wish.
     Overall, there seem to be a number of social advantages to being a high self-monitor. You tend to be better at getting people to like you, to listen to you, not to yell at you for getting in their way. You tend not to get in their way in the first place. You can shift, say, from the particular approach required for connecting to a 4-year-old, then manage a classroom of adolescents, then goof off with your family. You believe that Biblical thing about how you once spake as a child and now you've put away childish things, but you also know it's more complicated than that.
     But if you're too far into the high self-monitoring end of things, you're a terrible show off, or -- so much worse -- you're slick, and people smell something phony about you. You walk down the busy street wondering if you look good, look right for the occasion. You shape-shift for each conversation and you sort of lose track of who you are outside of the expectations of others.
     If you're too deep into the low self-monitoring end of things, you pick your nose and scratch your crotch as you walk down that street, forgetting that there is an art to hiding such things, the first involving strategic, casual gestures and the second involving strategic, casual use of pockets.
     Most psychiatric patients tend to be very low self-monitors. Sociopaths, though, are too high. You with me?
     Most of the rest of us are high self-monitors in peculiar ways, and way low in others. I, for example, kicked a black walnut for 3 miles today, absorbed in the challenge of keeping track of it among the autumn leaves and paying attention to cars as hazards but not caring about the possible judgment about what I was doing. That said, when the walnut crossed the street and many cars were parked at the light, I mimed, practiced as I am in such artistry, that I was crestfallen with my bad aim. I just kind of let my shoulders drop and my head fall. This communicated, "I may be kicking this walnut every 15 feet for a very long time, but you can see that I am sane. I am just really working on something here."
     (If you have ever been walking in one direction with other people around and then needed to turn and go back to your car, chances are you have mimed "Oops. Oh, my. I have forgotten something! Is it in this pocket? Is it in this one? Oh, dear! [perhaps a small stomp or huff would be good here] I am going to turn around, but you can see I am not a crazy person, because clearly I have (which is so unlike me!) forgotten something." You know what you do when no one is around? You just turn around. Nary a stomp or huff.)
     Still, by and large, in lots of the usual senses of self-monitoring, I tend toward the low end. I am either generally oblivious, rebellious, or too happy to care what you think. Few would accuse me of being slick. I think we can say that.
     That said, I have islands of absurdly heightened self-monitoring. Sometime in the mid-1990s, I got my first car with an automatic transmission. For months as I drove I tried to make it look like I was still shifting gears. Pulling away from stoplights, I'd drop my right hand toward where the gearshift used to be to give people in other cars, all of whom were looking into my car to see whether I was noble or corrupt, the illusion that I was shifting gears. Sometimes I'd even move my hand down, then up and toward the right, then down to the right. Ahhh...I think I'll just stay in 4th gear for awhile.    
     Your judgment of how I look is not much of a priority for me, but apparently your judgment of my goodness is. That I preferred the ease of an automatic transmission to the more ecological stick-shift was a selfish, indulgent choice. It's called "standard" for a reason, and I failed it.
     And when I walk by that piece of litter while you drive by, I assume you are wondering why I don't pick it up. So I often do, and I think, from the summit of high self-monitoring: "Note the Noble Soul Picking up Litter, Ye, Drivers on Main Street." Holding the Slurpee container with two fingers (the other digits extended and spread, so as to make it clear that the Slurpee container is litter I am nobly picking up, not something I would actually drink), I kick the walnut again. It shoots straight down the center of the sidewalk. I know no one is watching me make that perfect shot, but I think they are watching me carry the Slurpee container.
     This self-monitoring thing: it's more complicated than the E on the forehead. I can't say if the painting-hanging exercise nails you one way or another, but I'd love to try, if you know of a tilted room that needs decorating. Can I bring my walnut?