I got tagged...

Sarah over at Sector 9 tagged me.

I'm not big on the memes, but for lack of anything better to post about, I'll totally participate.

The concept for this one is to tell 8 facts about yourself... This isn't really anything new. I give you all facts all the time. Then we're supposed to tag 8 people. I'm not going to bother tagging anyone else, because well, if you want to do it, you'll do it, but I'm not going to force you into it!

Here goes!

1.) I love fresh basil. LOVE IT. To an alarming degree. This was an addiction I fed regularly when I was a flower slinger. As flower slingers we were also responsible for organizing and maintaining the veggies and herbs... So when the fresh ones came in, I could regularly be found flicking the basil plants so that I could sniff them... I was also occasionally known to carry one little basil plant around with me so that I had something to sniff while I was working on other things. And when I go to REAL pizza places or sandwich joints where they have fresh basil, I request EXTRA EXTRA basil, much to the irritation of people who wait on me. And before you think this carries over to all basil, I should note that the dried ground up crap they have available in the spice aisles around here is GROSS. And it doesn't taste the same when you're cooking with it either! It's fresh or not at all!

2.) I hate mustard. Again, to an alarming degree. Even just the smell of it can make me wretch. There is only one way that I will voluntarily eat mustard, and that is when it is made into honey mustard. Even with honey mustard, I've only found two restaurants that make a honey mustard I can consume without the urge to vomit.

3.) My two main focuses of college study were psychology and art. (These are the subjects I hold degrees in.) The thing that drew me to these subjects of study, (in addition to the fact that I've always had a bit of a knack for them, and you often enjoy studying something you're good at,) was that no matter how much you learn about them, there are always surprises. It's impossible to ever see it all or to know it all. I have heard the quote that says something to the effect of, "A wise man only knows that he knows nothing." That's how I like to approach life, and psychology and art just seem to fit so well with this life philosophy because no matter how much you know, there are always going to be surprises and new things to discover.

4.) I don't presently have any tattoos. I do want one though. Only a small group of my friends and a few members of my family know what it is that I want and where... I don't know why I haven't gotten it yet. I have wanted the same thing for long enough that I'm pretty sure I won't regret it the way so many butterfly-and-flower-inked women do these days.

5.) A friend of mine recently came over to see my apartment for the first time. As she oohed over my new furniture and got her first look at my place, she said something that I took as the highest compliment. She said, "It smells so clean!" I am happy that my apartment smells clean. It means that I'm not just putting up a clever facade. Looking clean can be managed easily enough, but smelling clean takes active involvement in the maintenance of the environment. (Now, my apartment LOOKS clean too, but the fact that a friend tells me that it SMELLS clean is something I take real pride in.)

6.) I might be somewhat of an odd duck, but when reading a book, or while watching movies, I guess you could say that I over-empathize with characters. This is not the fact I'm noting, rather, when a character in a book or a movie does something embarrassing and I get embarrassed for them out of empathy, to the point where I want to crawl under a rock on their behalf, I ABSOLUTELY HATE that feeling. I suppose it balances out the fact that I am so seldom embarrassed for the stupid stuff I wholeheartedly admit that I do every day... Or maybe I'm just so desensitized to my own stupidity that it doesn't matter, but when I can't avoid seeing others embarrassed, even when it is fictional, it bothers me to an unnerving degree.

7.) When my parents divorced, my mom thought it would be a good idea for my brother and I to have counseling sessions. There were individual sessions, and group sessions, and I attended them, but didn't give them much credit or thought. If you were to ask anyone about this time in my family, I was widely regarded as the one who handled it the best, and in the most calm and rational manner. Even looking back on it now, I don't think they provided me with much that was useful to me at the time. At present I am grateful for them though, because it helps to give me an insight into the way that other kids might have perceived the divorce of their parents, and it helps me to relate to kids when doing things like juvenile mentoring which is something that they now pay me for.

8.) I have traveled a fair amount, though nowhere near as much as I would like. I've been to Europe, but I've never seen anywhere in the U.S. west of the Rockies. I've never seen the Pacific ocean. I'd immensely like to remedy this. I don't see it happening any time soon though.