Things I used to forget before I had a place to write them down...etc.

From Et cetera

I am a fan of irony. It is one of nature's finest quirks and rarely unentertaining in its purest form. Especially enjoyable are those instances in which an example is required to illustrate my point because this sentence isn't heading in the direction of all-encompassing clairvoyance that I would prefer to offer readers. Basically, I'm picturing obscure things like, using a vacuum cleaner to clean the outside surface of a vacuum. Or better yet, using a vacuum to clean up broken bits of vacuum off the floor. Or how about the three little pigs and their pal Henny Penny sitting down together for a nice breakfast of bacon and eggs? I like things like that, they're funny. Or how about playing a cassette tape through your stereo, then using a microphone to record what's coming out of your speakers onto a new cassette tape on a different stereo? Completely pointless thing to do, but there's a certain charm about these kinds of scenarios.

This naturally leads to other things as the imagination wanders. Things like stapling a series of staples together. Throwing a garbage can in the trash? The possibilities are endless. What's most profound about it is not so much these entities in and of themselves but rather their relation to one another. I find it particularly fascinating that there is actually some connection between pigs eating pigs and stapling a bunch of staples together. What is it that really makes these things related? Probably just their redundancy. Pigs and pigs, staples and staples. But that's not so interesting. In my mind, I did not clump these two things in the same category because they are redundant. I was speaking of irony, not redundancy. To me, this communicates a very clear assurance that irony and redundancy are in fact very closely related. But without those examples, I probably never would've realized it, no less be able to explain it. I even balked in mid-sentence when first trying to convey my meaning without the use of examples. I simply couldn't do it.

Which brings me to examples being the best form of communication. Most of us are very aware that teaching by example is usually the most effective means of getting a student to learn. Of course, every student will learn differently but that doesn't change the fact that regardless of how well you communicate and understand the communication of others, it's still simpler to show someone how to tie their shoelaces than it is to explain it to them. Would you even understand basic mathematics if your elementary school had no blackboard to write upon? I kind of doubt it. Well, perhaps you'd get it by now, but it certainly wouldn't come so quickly. Maybe then, learning from an example is not so much a more effective means of learning as it is an efficient one. I suppose it's possible to explain anything to anyone in pure text alone, no examples whatsoever, and eventually they'll get it. But you can bet your life that it will take a long time. Furthermore, if you have no examples by which to compare your own conclusions, there's no saying whether your understanding of the concept is the correct one.

Speaking of blackboards, chalk is dust. And those brushes are used to clean the dust off of blackboards. When you are writing on a blackboard, you are willingly adding dust to the surface, meaning that you will have to clean it off later. You're knowingly making more work for yourself. There's something strange about that, too. Even if what you're writing does have a purpose.