Eight

Stew tagged me, the bastard. Here's my "crazy eights";

Eight things I am passionate about:

Beauty. It keeps me alive, I swear. I love the fact that it's everywhere I look. As I get older, more and more things have become beautiful. Perhaps my senses are growing more attuned. It can be found in the most unlikeliest of places - the corners of mouths, under pebbles, written in between the lines of a poem or in the single note of a song. Whilst I know it has no inherent value and that it exists only within the eye that beholds it, it gives me meaning. Call me a Gaia junkie if you will, I couldn't care less.

Objectivity / Rationality. I have little tolerance for flim flam, automatic assumption, bigotry, blind faith or superstition. Frankly it boils my piss when I come across it. I guess it's an obsession of mine to reflect on my own automatic assumptions, faiths and superstitions so that I might understand what it is about our fuzzy senses that make us so susceptible to these falsities.

Family / Love. It's in the genetics I'm sure, but my family are the most important thing to me by a mile.

Person Centred Dementia Care. I manage a number of Dementia care units for people with advanced Dementias or who, because of their condition, behave in ways which would challenge more 'traditional' care units. This work is hard physically, emotionally and psychologically and frequently underestimated. The skills, knowledge and values required to to this job well are beyond the reach of many. Yet our government expects the bulk of this work to be done by low paid, under-trained, under-valued people. I try to do my best to engineer the most optimal circumstances for these people to give good care. I'll stop here, before I go on one of my frequent soliloquies on the subject...

Recovery focused mental health care. I'm also responsible for a number of services providing care and support to younger adults with 'severe' mental health problems. By this I mean psychosis, bi-polar affective disorder (manic depression) and such like. Since the dawn of Psychiatry, these conditions have been thought of as incurable and chronic. The system treat them with this assumption. It still does to an extent. With the rise of the 'consumer movement' and service users finding their voice finally, it has become clear that people can learn to live perfectly decent lives with these conditions, given the right circumstances. The lumbering behemoth that is the mental health system is taking its time catching on to this. I'd like to think that I'm amongst those that agitate for change. I hope I'm making a difference, modest as it may be.

The outdoors. I love my Northumberland for its wide open spaces. I try to be outside in it whenever I can.

Running. Well, it gets me outside I suppose. If I don't get to run at least once a week I get irritable and tired. Perhaps I'm addicted.

Technology. Yup, I'm a geek and a man. As such I like all things with buttons and LEDs. Despite my attempts to temper these nerd compulsions, I know that I'll own an I-phone by the end of the year.

Eight things to do before I die:

Run the New York Marathon

Write a half decent book

Plan my funeral

Drive the Nurburgring in a stupidly fast car

Have my children grow into adulthood and tell me that they're happy in their own skin

See the Amazon & Ganges rivers

Grow into adulthood and feel happy in my own skin

Say something really enigmatic, in my final breath, that people will wonder about for generations.

Eight things I say often

Fuck

Perhaps

Erm

What?

Oh, for goodness sake

Sorry

Get down off the back of the sofa

No, I don't want double glazing, now fuck off.

Eight books I have read or am still reading:

The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

Cider With Rosie, Laurie Lee

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

Is it just me, or is everything shit? Steve Lowe

Collapse, Jared Diamond

Metaphors We Live By, George Lackoff

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

Eight songs to listen to over and over again:

This is a hard one, as it changes almost daily. So I will use only my last months listening as indicated by last.fm.

Four Tet - She Moves Me

Bright Channel - Light Workers

Low - California

The Six Parts Seven - Now Like Photographs

Coaltar of the Deepers - Good Morning

Squarepusher - Journey to Reedham

The Arcade Fire - No Cars Go

Mystery Jets - Soluble in Air

Eight things that attract me to friends:

Tolerance - well, they would have to be...

Wit

Intelligence

Modesty

Reflectiveness

Openness

Lack of pungent body odour

A present and working brain

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I can't be arsed to spread this meme any further. If you want to be tagged by me then just tear off a slip from the bottom of this post

The sniffles

It appears the Atheist Blogroll has been infected with a rather virulent meme. It has no herd immunity. There isn't a vaccination yet that cures bloggers of the urge to talk about themselves.

This particular meme replicates itself at an approximate rate of 1:8. By my reckoning, the entire human race will be infected within four weeks.

I caught my dose of it from Lynn's daughter. Now don't worry, I think I got a light dousing. Perhaps I've some natural immunity to these things; bit of a temperature and a familiar urge to self obsess, nothing more. I don't think I'll pass it on.

If you're fretting that you'll never get to tell your kids of the Great Meme don't worry. The odds are that you'll be infected any day soon.

These are the symptoms to watch out for;

• Sufferers will post a list of symptoms,
  
• The host is then compelled to share eight random facts/habits about themselves,
• The contagion is then unleashed upon eight other blogs (the symptom that I seem to be immune to),
  
• The infected are then informed that they've been 'tagged',
  
• The agent then runs off to the other end of the playground and hides behind the bike sheds.

Here's my eight facts and habits;

Habit. I like to rub the bit of skin that's between my bottom lip and chin. I do so with the side of my left index finger. At the end of the day, when my stubble has grown long enough, I find I get a satisfying rasp. I have no idea why I do this.

Fact. I'll be thirty five soon. This feels quite old, yet I can't shake off the feeling that I'm still just a kid.

Fact. I have very hairy feet. I'm convinced it fell off my head some time in my twenties.

Habit. I'm obsessively tidy. Also, I can't sit down for long periods. This means that I'm often found moving detritus into corners and cupboards. However, I'm a 'rammer'. Once the mess is packed into a cupboard, on a pile or under a bed I forget about it. Visitors do not get to look in our wardrobes.

Fact. For a Brit I have good teeth. I have no fillings, decay or wonky gaps. I was thirty three before I had my first dental intervention. Inconveniently it was Christmas Eve that a molar split in two. Four o'clock Christmas Day I was on a dentist's chair having it pulled out. I bit the dentist's finger.

Fact. Nobody will read this far. It really is quite dull. I think I'll stop now.