It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an OKCupid profile.

Every so often I'll get a call or an email from a friend sounding very concerned about a bump on their arm or a splitting headache or the like.

I'll listen very carefully as the problem starts sounding more and more dire, and finally I'll interrupt "You know, you really should talk to a doctor."

"But," they object, "you are a doctor!!"

"Oh," I say. "Right." Then I start to panic.

Vox.com once put me on their list of the top dozen bloggers on the Internet, along with Paul Krugman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. One day I intend to live up to the trust they have placed in me. Until then I use my writing talents primarily to come up with increasingly bizarre and complicated Tom Swifties.

My favorite fiction books are by Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Adams, J.R.R Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Terry Pratchett, S.M. Stirling, Jacqueline Carey, Kim Stanley Robinson, Yukio Mishima, and far too many other good people to name. My favorite nonfiction books are by Douglas Hofstadter, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Bertrand Russell, and Abdul Alhazred.

My favorite movies, shows, music, and foods are whichever ones I can finish fastest so I can get back to the books.

1. Quiet. I hate loud noises and loud places and especially loud people. I'm easily startled and easily distracted and don't have normal people's noise habituation response. That means no bars, no clubs, and none of those parties with boom boxes and fifty people trying to speak at once.

2. Quorn. Back when I considered it a reasonable idea to become a vegetarian despite hating most fruits and vegetables, I survived by eating Quorn instead of food. It tastes almost as good, but it doesn't have any of that pesky fat or cholesterol or baryonic matter. I stopped being fully vegetarian a couple of years ago, but Quorn still holds a special place in my heart and in my refrigerator.

3. Quests. I like to travel to strange places. Ulaan Baatar. Kathmandu. Yonaguni. Probably the most legit quest I have been on was when I made it to Glastonbury, England, where the Holy Grail is believed to rest at the bottom of a local well. They charged three pound sixty pence admission. It was kind of disappointing.

4. Quixotism. It's a good word, and I love the Don Quixote story. If I ever actually seriously learn Spanish I'd like to be able to read it in the original. Until then, I content myself with listening to the soundtrack from "Man of La Mancha" a lot.

5. Quire. This is how I spelled "choir" up until the sixth grade, which incidentally is also the last time I was in an actual choir, and I'm keeping it to stick to the "q" theme. It's been a long time since sixth grade, but I still sing. A lot. Sometimes karaoke, sometimes in the shower, and sometimes I just break into song when the opportunity presents itself.

6. Qualia. I did philosophy in college and have a special interest in philosophy of mind. One time I sorta might have maybe as a joke created a philosophy role-playing game that included a campaign where David Chalmers leads the armies of humanity against a plague of zombies. It kind of went viral on the Internet and snowballed until somehow the actual David Chalmers found out and said some nice things about it. My whole life is like this, somehow.

Philosophy, politics, psychiatry, how to design a perfect language, travel opportunities, the books I'm reading, the books I want to write, the future, whether things have been supported by double-blind randomized studies with p < .05 and if not why not, ships, shoes, sealing wax, cabbages, kings, psychology, constructed worlds, what to write in online profiles, history, alternate history, education, why the human brain has such bizarre failure modes, effective altruism, utilitarianism, whether or not to use the Oxford comma when coming to the end of a paragraph-sized list of things one spends a lot of time thinking about, and the fundamental purpose and order of the Universe.

Sleeping. Why, what do you do at night?

Which isn't to say I don't keep myself amused. I'm trying to learn lucid dreaming, the practice of staying conscious through dreams and controlling them. I've had limited success and am running through a series of experiments. I've already established I can compose poetry in dreams, which means that left-brain systematic thinking isn't completely turned off, but I'm waiting for a good opportunity to test whether I can also solve math problems.

I am polyamorous. I'm already dating a couple of people, though not too seriously. I'm also pretty asexual. So you should message me if you're okay with those things.

Or if you're not okay with those things, but want to see if the healing power of love can save me from a life of sin.

Or if you're not necessarily interested in a relationship, but you want to cuddle, or discuss philosophy, or discuss philosophy while cuddling. I am so serious about this.

Or if you can come up with more sets of words in which all five vowels can be plugged into a single spot and the word remains meaningful (for example: "pat", "pet", "pit", "pot", "put")

Or if you don't describe yourself as "down-to-earth". Of all the places you could be, Earth is literally the least interesting.

In Soviet Russia OKCupid, girl send message to you!