Stuff of the Week

I dressed up like a fairy last night for Tracy and Donald's party. I have enough costume shit in my various closets to construct several fairy costumes without ever having to leave the house. Maybe I shouldn't be admitting this.

I don't know if I can say I'm especially pumped about anything right now. Perhaps I'm just a bit grumpy. Ooh, I am excited about the spell check feature in Firefox 2.0 though. It gives you a little dotted red line under anything you type that looks funky, and if you right click on said word, it gives you the correct spelling. For notoriously shitty spellers, such as myself, this is a godsend.

I am over my dubiousness about my current class, Leadership and Team Development. The professor has won me over, and I think it's going to be a valuable experience. Even though I have to read Stephen Covey. Do you think it's not a coincidence that the guy who plays Locke on Lost looks like him? Seriously. Think about it. Of course, I think the end of season 5 of Buffy is based on the Fisher King myth. So I can pretty much find an allegory in a bag of potato chips, given enough time and caffeine.

I was introduced to the concept of allegory/analogy in the seventh or eighth grade. I was introduced to Jung in the 11th. I didn't understand either for crap for a long time, but I get it pretty well now. In my critical thinking class, we were told to beware of analogies when looking for data for research - they can be misleading. I believe this, I think analogies that are familliar and simple can keep you from looking at a problem objectively, the way a buzzword or cliche can do the same. Because it sounds familliar, it seems true. In fact, I think analogies can be used to hoodwink people into accepting stuff that's pretty unfounded, and herein lies my difficulty with Covey. I think analogy can be used very effectively to clarify a difficult concept, but I don't think it should be used to justify or codify it.

I'll write more about this when I've clarified my own thoughts around it. For now, imagine my distrust of oversimplified analogies is like being locked in a phone booth without a quarter when you have to pee really bad.
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p.s. I know this entry is repeating like three times, blogger is pissing me off.