Carrie and getting carried away with ridiculous travel plans

My friend Carrie is delightful and always eggs on the flights of fancy I have when thinking about trips or adventures I want to take. On the Myers-Briggs, we're both ENFPs and are totally more into the idea of things over the practical. Here's a list of trips that I want to take in the next year, along with the varying possibilities of me actually doing them:

- January: Mizzou has a ridiculous 5 weeks off for winter break. Awesome. There's a website my old co-worker showed me called lastminute.com Also, I want to check out cheapoair.com (I heard about it from a girl in one of my classes - I don't know how good it is). I want to go somewhere for a four days really bad. Maybe Montreal will finally work.
- May: My friend Dan is graduating from film school in Los Angeles a week after I graduate from Mizzou. I haven't seen the Grand Canyon since I was 15 months old. Carrie and I will take my car cross-country. Maybe.
June: various family trips and youth group trips (Illinois, Florida, North Carolina)
July: New York City for the first time ever. Sweet.
August: Beijing for the Olympics? If I go to Covenant Seminary, classes start the last Thursday of August, so that'll be cutting it tight. Three weeks in China. Is it enough?

...and after that is prolonging the wonderful student schedule where I get months off for travel. It's a good life.

Finally a response to Postmodernism

I've been reluctant so far to feed the arguments in my head against Postmodernism and its ideas that I'm hearing in class because I find that the more I argue against what I'm hearing in class the more I get angry at my teachers and the less I learn.

However, I have a paper due Monday on all of this and so I have to start formulating my opinions on what I think about Postmodernism.

It seems like the more I read about it, and based on what I know about the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the more I start thinking that this movement is a reaction by the Sensors in the world against the Intuitive Modernists. (I recognize that there is a lot more going on with this, but stick with me).

If it is like this, then this also feeds into the cyclical view of history, which I'm very interested in. Based on what (very little) I know and have observed, it makes a lot of sense that each generation reacts in a lot of ways against the one before it. This is a beautiful way for human kind to balance itself out. However, things start going sour when one side claims to hold their view (intuition vs. sensing, judging vs. perceiving, etc.) as the more perfect than the other and goes to the extreme to prove their point.

My theory is that a lot of postmodernism is rejecting the intuitive way of thinking in favor of the sensing. "Intuitive" on the Myers-Briggs can be characterized by a more big-picture way of thinking about things and its weakness is to create all-encompassing theories that leave out a lot of important facts. "Sensing," in contrast, is more detail oriented but can ignore larger life patterns that can be very helpful.

A quote from my Teach Yourself Postmodernism sounded like it was from a Myers-Briggs Sensor description: "As you know, postmodern thought tends to reject the idea of things having a single, basic meaning. Instead, it embraces fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity in matters of history, identity and culture. It is suspicious of any attempt to provide all-embracing, total theories. And it rejects the view that any cultural phenomenon can be explained as the effect of one objectively existing, fundamental cause" (101)

Thinking of postmodernism this way, as the natural and necessary counterbalance to the highly intuitive modernism, is extremely helpful. As you might be able to tell, I am on the intuitive side, and so have solved my problem with a broad theory. However, deconstruction and cynicism are extremely valuable, especially when tyrants come in with their (intuitive) broad social theories (like communism) and try to make everyone fit into their theory.