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Before launching our regular and meme-free schedule of things that hopefully aren't about me at all, an introductory set of things that are:
I hate being too hot and also do my best to avoid the sun: my natural habitat is skulking in the shade under a hat whingeing about the heat. Despite this, many of my favourite countries are in the topics. Perhaps this point could be summed up as: I like to make things difficult for myself.
I really cannot do multiple choice personality tests, at any rate not unless the available options include 'none of the above', 'it depends on what you mean', 'that's a false dichotomy' and, one of my personal favourites, 'it's more complicated than that'. Possibly this says all that needs to be said about my personality.
I can turn self-involved rambling to good purpose. Googling to check the correct technical term for something, I discovered my original point 3 was a pretty much perfect description of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Sadly, a quick check among those people immediately to hand suggests that explaining I have a rare and probably incurable circadian rhythm sleep disorder garners me no sympathy whatsoever. Apparently I remain undisciplined and lazy, even when I can produce documentary evidence that this is an unjust and harmful stereotype.
I compulsively play with punctuation. I can spend a happy and contented hour putting in and taking out commas and semicolons. While it is nice that I am so easily pleased, it does make prose composition somewhat slow.
I pretty much automatically play the Devil's advocate. Show me someone arguing something and my natural instinct is to look to the opposing view. I'll even do this to myself: any time I try to formulate a general principle, I immediately think of a host of exceptions. Now, I tend to think of this as a positive thing: there is most of the time at least something, however small, to be said for the other side in a debate, and I believe it worth saying, just as I believe a poor argument in the service of a good cause is still a poor argument, and indeed will not truly serve its cause in the long run. Unfortunately, given that I tend to automatically take the minority side in any debate, and given that it is natural to gravitate towards the people one largely agrees with, I am frequently to be found taking the side I do not, in fact, hold. I mean, I think I'm offering valid arguments, but not necessarily for the side I think is, overall and taking one thing with another, right. Most people being generally inclined to give to more weight to being on the right side than to being right on any given point, this is perhaps a pity. Have I said something about making things difficult for myself?
I am by circumstance and inclination a constant traveller. I will start calling anywhere I've slept for a few nights home, which does tend to confuse people. This isn't so much a deep and admirable commitment to studying other cultures as that I feel as comfortable slightly dislocated from my surroundings as most people do somewhere familiar. Few things make me happier than driving away from the airport somewhere I haven't been before, and as far as I'm concerned not having been somewhere before constitutes an entirely sufficient reason for going there. Homesickness is a concept I find deeply puzzling: I can miss people or specific things about a place (like the local cuisine or the number of good museums), but I can't imagine missing somewhere just because it's where I currently happen to live. The nearest I can come to imagining homesickness is that it must be like feeling for going back to one place what I feel for going anywhere else.
It is a matter of personal faith that it is not possible to have too many books. But then we all think that, yes?
I hate being too hot and also do my best to avoid the sun: my natural habitat is skulking in the shade under a hat whingeing about the heat. Despite this, many of my favourite countries are in the topics. Perhaps this point could be summed up as: I like to make things difficult for myself.
I really cannot do multiple choice personality tests, at any rate not unless the available options include 'none of the above', 'it depends on what you mean', 'that's a false dichotomy' and, one of my personal favourites, 'it's more complicated than that'. Possibly this says all that needs to be said about my personality.
I can turn self-involved rambling to good purpose. Googling to check the correct technical term for something, I discovered my original point 3 was a pretty much perfect description of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Sadly, a quick check among those people immediately to hand suggests that explaining I have a rare and probably incurable circadian rhythm sleep disorder garners me no sympathy whatsoever. Apparently I remain undisciplined and lazy, even when I can produce documentary evidence that this is an unjust and harmful stereotype.
I compulsively play with punctuation. I can spend a happy and contented hour putting in and taking out commas and semicolons. While it is nice that I am so easily pleased, it does make prose composition somewhat slow.
I pretty much automatically play the Devil's advocate. Show me someone arguing something and my natural instinct is to look to the opposing view. I'll even do this to myself: any time I try to formulate a general principle, I immediately think of a host of exceptions. Now, I tend to think of this as a positive thing: there is most of the time at least something, however small, to be said for the other side in a debate, and I believe it worth saying, just as I believe a poor argument in the service of a good cause is still a poor argument, and indeed will not truly serve its cause in the long run. Unfortunately, given that I tend to automatically take the minority side in any debate, and given that it is natural to gravitate towards the people one largely agrees with, I am frequently to be found taking the side I do not, in fact, hold. I mean, I think I'm offering valid arguments, but not necessarily for the side I think is, overall and taking one thing with another, right. Most people being generally inclined to give to more weight to being on the right side than to being right on any given point, this is perhaps a pity. Have I said something about making things difficult for myself?
I am by circumstance and inclination a constant traveller. I will start calling anywhere I've slept for a few nights home, which does tend to confuse people. This isn't so much a deep and admirable commitment to studying other cultures as that I feel as comfortable slightly dislocated from my surroundings as most people do somewhere familiar. Few things make me happier than driving away from the airport somewhere I haven't been before, and as far as I'm concerned not having been somewhere before constitutes an entirely sufficient reason for going there. Homesickness is a concept I find deeply puzzling: I can miss people or specific things about a place (like the local cuisine or the number of good museums), but I can't imagine missing somewhere just because it's where I currently happen to live. The nearest I can come to imagining homesickness is that it must be like feeling for going back to one place what I feel for going anywhere else.
It is a matter of personal faith that it is not possible to have too many books. But then we all think that, yes?