science is simply common sense at its best; that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

In fact, it does kind of burn when you lick a Big Red gum wrapper and stick it to your forehead.

Okay, well so far this week we've learned about respect and its role in communication (like we saw in "Dances With Wolves," they had a stick to pass around so people would take turns talking, and when the next person spoke, they would start their "two cents worth" with and instead of but. Because "and" shows that you're taking more of an active listening stance, whereas "but" suggests more of a selective listening mode, and that you're just negating what the person before you said. Also we did some sort of activity about a barking dog and at one point, when I was the observer, I was supposed to do something with X's and O's but I got really confused so I just played tic-tac-toe by myself, which makes it impossible to win or lose, but hey, we're not supposed to be competitive, right?

And then on Wednesday we all ate candy (thanks to whoever brought that) and got Valentine's from Rachel and Elle! Thank you! Even though I personally choose to celebrate Oregon Statehood Day on 14 February, there is nothing quite like Brand Spankin' New Doug valentines to brighten things up even more!! That was such a great show...

We learned that competitiveness isn't a good thing. Isn't it weird how in our society, everyone's goal is to put more distance between themselves and everyone else? What would it be like if people tried to be more unified? Anyway, I was glad to hear this, because I am not at all competitive. Life is less stressful that way, I think.

With the topic of a toxic roomate we were able to discuss a chart with consideration on the x-axis and courage on the y-axis. It shows how the interaction of these two variables results in people's personalities and the outcomes of their dealings with others. I'll just give a brief overview of these four attitudes:

With high courage and low consideration, the individual in question will seek a win/lose outcome and will have an agressive-defensive attitude when conflict arises (or even when it doesn't and they just want to complain about something).
Low courage and high consideration leads to the opposite; this passive defensive person becomes a doormat because they're doing everything they can for other people because they want to be liked.

Actually, I have an experience about what happens if these two behavior patterns continue against each other; I can say from experience that the dominant/demanding person will continue to get more demanding, and in this case I was the doormat and over the course of like two weeks my EBA with this person had a definite deficit as far as I was concerned, and they kept pushing at me and finally there came a time where there was a last straw and things got really really bad--definitely a lose/lose, destructive situation for both of us.

However, if we'd been better at communication, we may have been able to end up in a win/win situation (though it probably would have been compromise, the lowest form of win/win, and I think that would've kept things ending up badly). In retrospect, I think I would have just decided to disengage from interacting with this person altogether, because whatever the issue was was far more reaching because once things were resolved between me and this individual, she started going after one of my friends. It was just really weird.

Another thing we covered was an extended "maturity continuum." On the bottom is codependence, above that is counterdependence, then dependence, then intradependence, then interdependence, which has three degrees of glory in and of itself, the lowest being interdepencence, then above that comes independence (not sure how that works based on what we've learned earlier), and the highest of them all is inter-independence.

I will go into more detail but it's 10:27 p.m. now and I'm sort of bored with this at the moment.