I have been tinkering around with the Moveable Type (MT) software all week, and I can understand why it has so many fans. It's very configurable and powerful software, and even though it lacks some of the features of other blog software like blogger and LiveJournal, I'm going to stick with it. There is still lots that I haven't investigated yet, notably how to change the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to overhaul the design of the Web site. I had found a Web site caled Moveable Style (I think) that illustrated this feature nicely, but I've lost the URL.
Oh no, wait, I've found it! Check this out: Moveable Style, which brilliantly demonstrates how you can make dramatic changes to the layout of your blog just by adjusting your CSS. Cool.
Anyway, one of the features of MT is the ablity to assign your entries to one or more named categories. It can be an interesting exercise to see how your life divides up into categories; everybody seems to have their own way of splitting life up into little boxes, don't they?
This past summer I attended a particularly funny one-man show as part of the 2003 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. The show, Seven Sins, was written and performed by the openly gay American standup comedian James Judd, and featured vignettes from his eclectic and bizarre life and career experiences, demonstrating each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, to sell-out crowds at the Festival. And Judd has had a rich life to mine for material: at various times he has been a grape farmer, a criminal defense attorney, and an editor of a technology magazine during the height of the dot.com boom.
This got me to thinking: hey, I could use the same sort of thing to organize quite a few of my posts. But of course, I had to change things a bit, given that I've been studying the Enneagram for a full year now:
The Enneagram (pronounced "ANY-a-gram") is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. It is a development of modern psychology that has roots in spiritual wisdom from many different ancient traditions. (Riso, Don Richard. The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Bantam, 1999. p.10)
The Enneagram, as "an ancient tradition of remembering the nine Divine attributes as they are reflected in human nature" (Riso, p. 22), found their way into the Christian tradition in a flipped way; the opposites of the Divine attributes became the basis for the Seven Deadly Sins, or Capital Sins, or Passions.
So I went and created categories, not for the Seven Deadly Sins, but for the seven sins plus two (fear and deceit) which comprise the Nine Passions of the Enneagram:
1. Anger (Resentment)
2. Pride (Vainglory: pride in one's own virtue), associated with Flattery
3. Deceit (Lying, Arrogance), associated with Vanity and the Ego
4. Envy, associated with Melancholy
5. Avarice (Greed), associated with Stinginess
6. Fear, associated with Cowardice
7. Gluttony (not just for food, but for all positive, stimulating experiences), associated with (Over-)Planning
8. Lust (for intensity, power and control; does not refer only to sexual lust), associated with Vengeance and Revenge
9. Sloth (Indolence, Laziness)