I'm somewhere between searching for the grail and tilting at windmills. I'm not sure I care which is which.

My life is pretty damn sweet, full of joy and kindness and smiling and wonderful people. I get pretty excited about being alive.

Mostly I'm trying to live with intention. I don't want to look back and wonder where the hell the time went. I want to have some amazing stories to tell. If all goes well, those stories will involve dinosaurs, ninjas, shamen, and maybe some zombies.

My career doesn't fit neatly on a business card, which is kind of awkward in this town. I'm a grad student, writer/ethnographer, yoga and pilates teacher, and fancy drink maker. It's good to be a social scientist. I get paid to sit with women to learn about their drinking practices and attitudes. No, seriously. It's completely fascinating and awesome and takes me cool places. Once a woman I was interviewing told me, "cuida bien mi historia" -- take care of my story. I take that responsibility seriously. I just finished one masters and have another year in my second to decide whether or not I want to be suckered into academia for another 5-7 years to get a doctorate.

You know what? I love DC. I've been here more than a few years, and it's my home. I'll probably end up on the West Coast, Peru, or Uganda one day.

Stuff I love to do: travel (is there anyone who doesn't say that?), hang out with the many wonderful people in my life, sit in the park/be outside, smile just cuz it's [insert day here], climb up rocks and fake plastic rocks, make boozy delicious things in mason jars, drink boozy delicious things from mason jars, rock out at concerts, grow things on my roofdeck, cook crazy delicious and healthy local food, write deep and meaningful thoughts that upon further reflection probably aren't so brilliant, bike around the city pretending I'm in a sweet movie, play in the mountains/beach/snow, meditate, make awesome mixtapes.

I don't drink coffee and I'm allergic to beer, which is a giant evolution fail.

making slightly confusing neologisms. Helping people discover what they love about being in their bodies. Impressive survival skills: building a fire that puts Prometheus to shame and feeling the full spectrum of emotions. Biking anywhere in the city faster than a bus. When dumped in a new city, almost immediately procuring the perfect mixtape to listen to while I intentionally get myself lost.

Dimples. Sigh.

Books: The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Asterios Polyp, The Book Thief, What is the What, Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Savage Detectives, Shortcomings, Blankets, Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Devil in the White City, Rebecca, The Corrections, Anna Karenina, anything Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Light on Yoga, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Stiff. A LOT of cookbooks and cocktail recipe books.

Bah, who am I kidding? I mostly read grad school texts these days, with titles like, "Writing at the Margins", "Drink, Power, and Culture in the Andes", "The Role of the Drunk in Rural Oaxaca", "Pathologies and Power", and "Drunken Comportment". And if I'm not reading those, I'm probably reading about yoga anatomy or philosophy. Or the New Yorker.

I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with Downton Abbey. And the Walking Dead. Those shows would be amazing combined, by the way.

Movies: Man Push Cart, Goodbye Solo, Dr. Strangelove, Brazil, Lebowski, Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Third Man, Rebecca, Bande a Part, Caddyshack, and a billionty others I can't think of right now.

Musics -
Lately: Braids, Cults, Alt-J, David Wax Museum, Purity Ring, Frightened Rabbit, Django Django
Standards: Cloud Cult, Spoon, Beach House, Walkmen, Okkervil River, Deerhunter, PJ Harvey, Black Angels, Le Tigre
Classics: Lee Hazlewood, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Robyn Hitchcock, Raincoats, Gang of Four, Jesus & Mary Chain, Wire, Sonic Youth, Neil Young

I love all the local sustainable goodness. I don't even know what to do with myself in the months when my CSA goes out, and I get really excited about things like heirloom Christmas lima beans. Hot peppers are a food group in my world, as is mole. I make some insanely delicious cocktails and religiously believe that vodka is for suckers.

Bike
Passport
Carefully-calibrated mixtapes for every occasion
Yoga mat and legwarmers
Journal/Record of Note
My key necklace

Breathing in and out. Contentment. How bodies work. Hegemonic femininity and homosocial ritual drinking practices. Also, the meow mix song gets stuck in my head a lot. Like, a LOT.

either out at a concert, somewhere that requires a passport, snuggled in front of my fireplace with a good book, going to my favorite yoga class, making a craft cocktail with friends, or doing drinking research. Orrrrrrrrrrm if I was gonna be totally truthful, wandering around the aisles of Whole Foods with my best friend trying to figure out what we're going to eat because we got really hungry and really loopy.

I have three seasons of MacGyver on DVD for emergency situations.

you're still reading at this point and you are awesome.