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Monthly Archives: October 2007
zimbabwe martial arts
and curious!
Openness to Experience
Openness to Experience describes a dimension of cognitive style that distinguishes imaginative, creative people from down-to-earth, conventional people. Open people are intellectually curious, appreciative of art, and sensitive to beauty. They tend to be, compared to closed people, more aware of their feelings. They tend to think and act in individualistic and nonconforming ways. Intellectuals typically score high on Openness to Experience; consequently, this factor has also been called Culture or Intellect. Nonetheless, Intellect is probably best regarded as one aspect of openness to experience. Scores on Openness to Experience are only modestly related to years of education and scores on standard intelligent tests.
Another characteristic of the open cognitive style is a facility for thinking in symbols and abstractions far removed from concrete experience. Depending on the individual’s specific intellectual abilities, this symbolic cognition may take the form of mathematical, logical, or geometric thinking, artistic and metaphorical use of language, music composition or performance, or one of the many visual or performing arts. People with low scores on openness to experience tend to have narrow, common interests. They prefer the plain, straightforward, and obvious over the complex, ambiguous, and subtle. They may regard the arts and sciences with suspicion, regarding these endeavors as abstruse or of no practical use. Closed people prefer familiarity over novelty; they are conservative and resistant to change.
Openness is often presented as healthier or more mature by psychologists, who are often themselves open to experience. However, open and closed styles of thinking are useful in different environments. The intellectual style of the open person may serve a professor well, but research has shown that closed thinking is related to superior job performance in police work, sales, and a number of service occupations.
Domain/Facet……….. Score 0——–10——–20——–30——–40——–50——–60——–70——–80——–90——–99
OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE…..98 **************************************************************************************************
..Imagination…………..83 ***********************************************************************************
..Artistic Interests…….71 ***********************************************************************
..Emotionality………….57 *********************************************************
..Adventurousness……….94 **********************************************************************************************
..Intellect…………….91 *******************************************************************************************
..Liberalism……………99 ***************************************************************************************************
Your score on Openness to Experience is high, indicating you enjoy novelty, variety, and change. You are curious, imaginative, and creative.
———-
Openness Facets
Imagination. To imaginative individuals, the real world is often too plain and ordinary. High scorers on this scale use fantasy as a way of creating a richer, more interesting world. Low scorers are on this scale are more oriented to facts than fantasy. Your level of imagination is high.
Artistic Interests. High scorers on this scale love beauty, both in art and in nature. They become easily involved and absorbed in artistic and natural events. They are not necessarily artistically trained nor talented, although many will be. The defining features of this scale are interest in, and appreciation of natural and artificial beauty. Low scorers lack aesthetic sensitivity and interest in the arts. Your level of artistic interests is high.
Emotionality. Persons high on Emotionality have good access to and awareness of their own feelings. Low scorers are less aware of their feelings and tend not to express their emotions openly. Your level of emotionality is average.
Adventurousness. High scorers on adventurousness are eager to try new activities, travel to foreign lands, and experience different things. They find familiarity and routine boring, and will take a new route home just because it is different. Low scorers tend to feel uncomfortable with change and prefer familiar routines. Your level of adventurousness is high.
Intellect. Intellect and artistic interests are the two most important, central aspects of openness to experience. High scorers on Intellect love to play with ideas. They are open-minded to new and unusual ideas, and like to debate intellectual issues. They enjoy riddles, puzzles, and brain teasers. Low scorers on Intellect prefer dealing with either people or things rather than ideas. They regard intellectual exercises as a waste of time. Intellect should not be equated with intelligence. Intellect is an intellectual style, not an intellectual ability, although high scorers on Intellect score slightly higher than low-Intellect individuals on standardized intelligence tests. Your level of intellect is high.
Liberalism. Psychological liberalism refers to a readiness to challenge authority, convention, and traditional values. In its most extreme form, psychological liberalism can even represent outright hostility toward rules, sympathy for law-breakers, and love of ambiguity, chaos, and disorder. Psychological conservatives prefer the security and stability brought by conformity to tradition. Psychological liberalism and conservatism are not identical to political affiliation, but certainly incline individuals toward certain political parties. Your level of liberalism is high.
Africa and the Daemonic
I’m thinking about Africa, and what we, (as children in school) and what adults (as teachers) used to think of as the expression of ‘spirit’. Having just regarded the induction of several volunteers into a Catholic nunnery on TV last night — as part of an ongoing experiment with people’s minds known as “Reality TV” — I am inclined to think one thing: If these volunteers were being led into an encounter with the divine, then we, as African school children were often more likely to be led into an encounter with the “daemonic”. And what is this “daemonic” sense but the qualities of life that spontaneously burst forth, overthrowing the plodding good will and/or rational insinuations implied by a mechanistic society, through a kind of temporary madness.
It’s odd, I suppose, how much this sense of the daemonic twists, turns and infuses itself within my own experience of African culture. The quality of sudden high excitement, of being touched by the imperturbable nature of life (for instance in a sudden storm, or in the revelation that the adults aren’t all they’re cracked up to be), the encounter with life found wallowing in its paradoxes in confrontation with an irrational upsurge of counter-reality — this, to my mind, forms so much a part of my own African consciousness and humour. The fact that native African humour became became my humour, too, makes me more African than any of my parents.
The quality of the daemonic is revealed through situations that I, for want of a better word, will call “mad”. These situations are not truly mad at all, but a revelation of the natural condition of things emerging in way counter to the way in which Modernity, as a social control mechanism, ordains for them. This concept of the daemonic is, I believe, at the source of very much African humour. The rationality of civilised existence ordains one thing — but nontheless, that which the rational system of things overlays takes over.
One, of course, laughs MADLY at this, because one is automatcially seduced by the daemonic and becomes one with it. (This laughter has often been misunderstood by westerners as racist, or even as madly inappropriate, but this is partly a misunderstanding of the way that the divine expresses itself in African humour — namely through a crude overturning of one’s best intentions in various situations especially prevalent because of the rudimentary nature of third world civilisation.)
It seems to me that the mood of the daemonic is extreme and pervasive within African culture. You can see it in Nigerian Toyin Falola’s A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. Here, the train that takes the young Falola away from his home town to a town miles away, whereupon he gains ad hoc employment as the assistant of a street beggar, implicitly and seductively daemonic. It exercises a compulsion upon the youthful mind of the adventurous Falola, forcing him in a way that we do not know to board it, and then to follow on, with an experiential journey that will lead him who knows where. (He ends up in another city for several months, and everybody in his home town thinks he must be dead. Yet, finally the forces of life spit him back home again.)
The sense of the daemonic is, in a way a resignation to the forces that operate independently of human will, as “the divine”. Impulsiveness as well as the willingness to be seduced by the path less travelled by are features of an African way of thinking which invoke the divine. This is not too different from a sense of the divine humour which pervaded the resignation of the white Zimbabwean community upon the establishment of a “communist” government in Zimbabwe. The wry turns of phrases that followed in train — Heroes and Ancestors day became Gooks and Spooks , for example — was certainly racist, but for all that, not devoid of a distinctive sense of the daemonic. These verbal configurations of the whites were often as much in the spirit of recognising qualities of the daemonic intervening within the reality of a flailing modernity, as they were implicitly racist.
This africanisation of the white Zimbabwean mindset is a part of white Zimbabwean humour that is hard to recognise, because some aspects of the humour are expressly racist. Yet the Africanisatio of the mood of such expressions should not be overlooked. That is, in so many aspects of African humour (black and white) a daemonic mood of joyous resignation to the forces that are seen to undermine the staunch spirit of civilised Modernity.
My Right-Wing Dad
Bourgeois ideology
…can be counteracted by bourgeois ideology!
Bourgeois ideology is an Idealism, and therefore does not allow a person to flow with it. It categorises, cordons off, and limits actions to that which corresponds to convention.
In turn, one’s interactions with the bourgeois class can be similarly cordoned off. They needn’t mean more than you think they should.
You do not need to take them seriously.
Freak.
I have received a different revelation about things. I t’s a level of maturity like as thick as a rhinoceros. Whatever you do, commit to it fully. Now, I didn’t choose this principle, but it is in my blood. I want to, but I just can’t seem to shake it out.
I worry about myself sometimes because of the huge amount of stoic principles that I can bring to bear against myself. Yesterday’s evidence of this is several blisters all over my feet from walking all over town. I couldn’t sit still or simply shop in normative pedestrian fashion, since half of my mind knew that I should have been sparring during that hour. So instead I paced. Indeed I marched around – looking at all the marketable fashion, and comparing my all too boxy figure, which I’m still getting used to, to the figure of one who would fit into the frilly festivities of the boutique attire.
This was all whilst waiting to hand over someone else’s cheque, within an hour, after signatures that I’d collected had been checked against a system to be sure that they were genuine.
I don’t like my new tendency to feel all situations as if they were water falling off a duck’s back. This is akin to not feeling at all — the adrenaline that goes into the punch full of commitment doesn’t mind or matter where the punch lands. There is the commitment only, then the recoil. To reflect hard on the effects of landing something or not landing is not part of the mental process of the fighter.
The stoicism that manages this logic is quite great. It’s come as if from nowwhere, like the superego from another culture, covering me like heavy blankets with no holes to air, to think. Just the commitment. And the recoil.
Blah! There are no boutiques that offer anything that I could wear now. This is freakish.
feeling oddness
I should have trained today, and didn’t. Oddness is the feeling from within my bones.
Half asleep, moving quietly, I roamed through city streets, feeling the allergies of octobernovemberand december, rolling into one. I must live at the precise vector of a million breeding plants. The Bermuda Triangle of many vegetative instincts is the suburb in which I dwell. I move stealthily to avoid the eruptions of many brilliant and dazzling allergic flares.
I do my best. But better is the burning of the sudden martial arts explosion letting rip as fire and heart become one beating organ. I miss it when the evening falls and this state of things has not arrived. I claw myself forth more sluggardlike, embracing routine as a fashion.
My left ear is getting blocked with wax, now, as we speak.
This summer rips apart the best of me. I lie in wait for more exhausting nights, when the shimmer and blanket of the heat leaves no expectation of relief unturned.
The blocked ear means I start to hear my own breathing a little, now and then, leaving me holding my air in, to restrain feelings from being trapped within. I shall have to break free.
The pollen here and there has dug its barbs into my soul.
rien
Open thread on reification « Writhe Safely
Secular Party of Australia principles
Your Score: Older Futhark
You scored
Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There’s only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.
| Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
It’s a great day! To shop online!
b;ah
| Harry Potter Character Combatibility Test created with QuizFarm.com |
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| You scored as Harry Potter
You are Harry Potter. You are daring, and have quite a lot of nerve. You rely on your instincts to make decisions. You’re a natural leader. You are highly concerned with justice and actively fight for what you feel is right.
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Boxing today
There will be no boxing today, nor any kickboxing either. I’ve been so busy that there simply hasn’t been time.
Last night, I went in search of the boxing ring. At least, my spirit self did. It had been dismantled, although maybe I had merely misplaced its location. Couldn’t it have been on a different floor in this multi-tiered gym?
I went looking, but I didn’t find it. Instead I looked down from nine or ten floors upon an Olympic swimming pool. There were steel bars, as thick as three of your friends’ arms, separating the lanes of the pool. Young boys were throwing themselves down from the enormous height, into the water. One boy floated up because the breeze was so strong. Narrowly, he hoped to miss landing on the steel bar and being quarterised. I couldn’t look. (In BASE jumping, the force of wind can sometimes blow the jumper back against the concrete object they have leaped from.)
But Mike took all his courage in his hands, and jumped. “Weren’t you afraid?” I said.
“Only a little–” quoth he.
identity
Hard to understand for some people, I know — but identity (including racial identity) — was far more of an ideologically entrenched affair in industrialized Western culture, than it was for me under Rhodesian colonialism. It really is like well meaning Westerners have to bend over backwards to combat their own entrenched ideas about race, because the categories that define identity here are so absolute. In my generation’s experience of Rhodesian culture (which was different from that of my parents), racial difference was more organically (rather than mechanistically — as in the West) defined.
So, we could traverse boundaries through social interaction without feeling that we were taking up any particular political position in doing so. This was, of course, in the case of my generation — and of course there were variations, I suppose, in different individuals’ behaviour, but it was more or less along this line. I only learned later that I was supposed to have the negative and profoundly condescending attitudes towards blacks that westerns harboured themselves, and which they were keen to combat within themselves. I was not psychologically constructed in such a way that I felt the need to combat some kind of a priori presupposition of superiority within myself.
Being brought up during war time in Rhodesia, I already felt that difference (virtually of any sort) was a manifestation of creativity in the world. My favourite compliment for someone was that they were “mad”. I had a very different way of looking at things way before I came to the Western environment. I couldn’t believe the stiffness of people here, and their deeply held intentions to prove themselves in every way to be ‘not mad’.
Petro-Euros « Professor Zero
notebookeleven » Blog Archive » Levinas, language and subsumption#comment-25887
HowardFacts :: Where next on Extreme Workplace laws?
As you can see from my little profile picture on the right, when I was 12, I thought that doctors were walruses. This must have been a cultural perception. Marechera saw ambulance men as warthogs, and suggested that they would rape you, boy or girl, if you were unconscious.
See in the same picture what I thought of nurses! The medical profession seemed to me to be pretty sadistic!
This was the colonial system of medical practice, which saved me from appendicitis after a 10 hour operation in the nick of time. My appendix had burst.
Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly
Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly
The dangers of creationism in education
