rational

I work in a very amiable environment of skilled and intelligent people, all of whom are very different, and each of whom has their own "-isms" - like the chap down the end who is permanently cute and into scaring people out of their skins, the loud New Zealander who never interprets any social-context comments correctly and irks people in the process, the delightful South African down the other end who speaks five African languages in addition to English and whose laugh is so 'chipmunk' and free that you can only laugh with her, even if you don't know what she's laughing about.

There's also one who I love to bits, but whose irrational temper makes her, at times, very difficult to be around. We're all desperately complex beings, so who can say what different elements interact to give rise to the net product that is, ultimately, our own personality?

My friends think of me as frank, easy going, reassuringly optimistic, irritatingly pragmatic, and very patient. They accept that an inevitable corollary of my patience is an explosive temper, but since my boundaries can be stretched quite a ways (not so much with loved-ones perhaps - they get special treatment), this has only been seen by one or two of my closest, and certainly not by people I work with.

I recognise, of course, that this is just me, and yet it is still hard to fathom how it is that people can be so tempestuous, so very emotionally self-indulgent, around those who really shouldn't be expected to put up with it. It really isn't fair for people to have to repeatedly tip-toe around another person's volatile moods - we're not family. Yesterday was great; we all went about practically silent for half the working day because a volcano was quietly seething on the bench behind me. Sigh. Kids.

As an aside, I mentioned to TEFL the other day that I was thinking about putting up some travel-related pages - such pages abound on the net, I suppose, but I've taken in a few places, here and there, and would quite enjoy writing about them, bit by bit. Best of all, were I to use MT, other people could contribute too. How would you present it? Good idea/bad idea? Answers on a virtual postcard!