A diacritic is a mark that is used to set a letter, syllable or word apart from others that look otherwise similar. On a mostly unrelated note, I want to start a band called Macron Below.

I've been in Providence just long enough to be a townie, but not long enough to be a local. The latter category, I think, requires "since you were born" if not "for three generations".

A collection of mostly true things that are mostly "I" statements:

I'm not a vegetarian, but I don't like meat very much, and I never eat red meat any more. It doesn't bother me when people eat meat, but it bothers me when they do so without seeming to understand that it came from an animal.

I have a strange knack for finding four-leaf clovers.

My wife calls me Princess. It can't be true; I cook. *

I used to have a crush on Pippi Longstockings, Red Fraggle, and Polly O'Keefe. For certain values of "used to".

I'm awfully fond of the sorts of things people associate with coffee shops for someone who doesn't like coffee.

I'm a feminist, but only for the chicks.

I am not corrigible. Could not possibly be corriged. Try to corrige me, you'll just be disappointed.

I am judging you for your answer on the 89547 question, but just a little. More if you've marked one of the wrong answers as the only acceptable one. Hint: you probably have.

I don't have a degree. I mention it because it surprises a lot of people. I'd refer to myself as an "autodidact" if that weren't both pretentious and redundant; who *isn't* self-educated?

My gentle, all-natural formula will soothe away aches and pains. For topical or alimentary use only.

I act like a gas in social situations, both in the sense that I'm funny and in the sense that I expand to fill available social space. Maybe this just makes me a gasbag.

I like you in those glasses.

I'm told I'm like a "svelte bear", but I don't know if that's the member of the family Ursidae or the large and hairy brand of gay men.

I prove the rule.

I am over 30 years old and standing on my balcony filling my neighborhood with soap bubbles.

I'm famous on the intranet.

Things I have brought to a first date include: crayons, chocolates, handcuffs, Good Omens, absinthe, and a duffel bag with three day's worth of clothes. Different dates, though.

I am a skinny little emo kid trapped in the body of an Indiana farmboy.

I get along best with women who get along best with men. I don't pretend to understand why that is.

I tune out anyone the moment they say something about how "girly" or "manly" they are. I may not be androgynous, but my politics are.

I am low but non-zero maintenance.

I moonlight as a game designer, for card games, board games, tabletop games, etc. I have a few published credits that I'll point out if you're curious.

I have a song in my heart, a kite in my pocket, and a bottle opener on my head.

I'm not so superficial that I'll look at your pictures instead of reading your profile, but I'm just superficial enough that I'll look at your pictures first. Then I'll read your profile.

I get a little weirded out when I have a high match percentage with someone who looks too normal.

Expanding the list of awesome-people-who-will-take-my-phone-calls-and-do-things-with-me past the point where it is tenable to simultaneously maintain all of these relationships.

Listening to live music whenever I can manage it.

Going back to school. Considering a PhD in information security, which I'd have to be an absolute moron to drop my cushy lifestyle and salary to pursue, but sometimes I am an idiot and academia appeals.

Writing about tech issues for a non-technical audience. Writing code that I was sick of not seeing available.

I used to claim here that I was only really bad at Othello (the game, not the play), but I'm recently discovering that I'm also bad at the following things:

* Twister
* Suffering fools
* Leaving well enough alone
* Not fidgeting
* Sleeping
* Accepting weaknesses

This does not answer the question, I know. Oh, right,

* Answering the question asked

I'm usually told it's my hair. Occasionally the glasses. Unless I'm being very clumsy it is almost never the chloroform.

I used to solicit my friends to say something nice here, but then for a while the awards filled that function and I removed the stuff. And now they're gone, too, as is the way of all things in this life. Ah, the beauty and transience of the world is enough to make one weep.

I don't feel a need to list my absolute top picks of everything. Take these, then, not as my "favorites", but as the sort of things that, if mentioned in one's profile, would indicate someone I'd want to know.

Books: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn; The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker; Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter (I ended up reading the chapter from this about jukeboxes and recursion while sitting next to a jukebox that was playing a song about jukeboxes); Who Killed Retro Girl? and Sandman: The Kindly Ones (I like a good graphic novel, but I know very little about them, and my education is piecemeal)

OH MY GOD Edward Gorey illustrated a printing of Edward Lear's The Jumblies and no one told me about it. WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS?! THEY WENT TO SEA IN A SIEVE!

I'm also enjoying my audio books lately. Right now I'm on Christopher Hitchen's memoir, Hitch-22. My opinions on Hitchens are complicated, but he was a complicated man, so.

Recently seen: I'm watching the second This American Life movie and weeping while Rakoff dances. I also just got through The West Wing a second time, watching the fake Clinton presidency fade into the fake Obama presidency, presenting a world in which we can all just pretend the second Bush didn't happen, if we weren't still saddled with one and a half wars. At least there's health care.

Iconic artists: The Avett Brothers,PJ Harvey,Rasputina,Blackalicious,Steeleye Span,Ben Sollee,Trout Fishing in America,Dan Bern,Mandy Marie and the Cool hand Lukes,Mates of State,Lucero,ilyAIMY,Bitch & Animal,Mark Lanegan,MC Frontalot,Jane Jensen,Dead Moon,The Roots,Jess Klein,Handsome Boy Modeling School

This is something I plan to keep up-to-date with what I'm currently listening to.

I love food, and I tend to play around with it. However, the recent discovery that I have celiac sprue has changed my diet significantly--honestly for the better all around. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds, and it also means I won't steal any of your bread.

If I use a recipe, it's as a reference point for ratios and not at all as a step-by-step of what I'm actually going to do. I'm often asked for recipes, but the best I can usually do is reverse-engineer my process and give an approximation. Recipes feel dead to me; actual cooking involves steps like "add flour until it looks right".

I sorely wish that savory cocktails would come back into vogue. I'm really tired of looking at a "martini list" and seeing seven things that are made with chocolate liqueur, four with sour mix, and absolutely none that are gin-and-a-hint-of-vermouth.

If one takes the occasional break to just point one's head away from the earth, one notices things that are both supremely present and entirely invisible to almost everyone else. It's like joining an exclusive club whose only membership requirement is that you occasionally look up.

I love, beyond belief love, the sensation of being in a place that is "supposed" to be full of people in its off hours, when there's no one there, or when only the true believers show up. Schools after school, churches in the middle of the night, bars on Christmas or the office on a holiday.

There is a temperature that a perfectly brewed hot drink hits when it's just short of too hot and not quite lukewarm when it becomes briefly just exactly right, and the ritual of *sip* *ow* *wait* *sip* *ow* *wait* *sip, sip siiiiiip, gulp gulpgulp* is addictive. I live for that moment when the temperature is beautifully perfect. Then I brew another. Turns out, in the office, this temperature is 1:47 in the microwave for one cup of water.

Museums are intensely appealing to me. Probably overly so. I've been known to become a bit... overwhelmed... and er... amorous... occasionally, in the right museum. Bodyworlds really did it for me, which probably touches on several other fascinations.

The crazy acceleration of communication technology is my favorite thing about this modern world, and I wouldn't want to live at any other time. We are on the cusp of something, and I think that something is fantastic. I cannot wait to see what next week brings, let alone next year.

We people have our problems and our faults, and we can be terrible to one another, but we are beautiful. Out of this chaos we create works of art and love toward one another and we never stop, we never stop, no matter how horrible our circumstances. Starving, beaten, ruined, we make beauty with our last breaths, in hopes that someone else might see it, or just in hopes that it might outlive us.

HELP I'M TRAPPED IN A PROFILE FACTORY

Home, because I'm recovering from Thursday's night out and getting ready for friends or lovers coming in on Saturday and staying through Monday. Fuck your prescriptivist notions of encapsulated party time.

There are few things I'm unwilling to admit anywhere, but there are a handful of items that I've avoided putting in my profile. All together, they go a little something like this:

I'm an active liberal, a feminist, an environmentalist to some extent if not enough of one, and a political nerd. I'm somewhat kinky and dominant, but I'm capable of scaling the latter back to assertive when necessary--submissive is only something I can pull off on rare occasions at the special request of someone I like very much. I'm non-monogamous. I'm compulsively honest and confessional, and am likely to tell you a lot more than you asked to (or wanted to) know about me. I'm listed as bisexual, but I'm probably more properly considered bi-curious, as I haven't actually been with any men and don't feel that I need to unless I meet the right one (or the right couple). I'm deeply dependent on my independence. Let's see... I cry at sad movies, wounded animals, exceptionally pretty art and the occasional sunrise. I'm probably a hipster of some stripe, but I hate to admit it. "Asking people out" makes me a bundle of nerves for days afterward regardless of the response. I'm secretly an agent of the Zorklax Consortium here to harvest your human spleens for experimentation and display.

You should message me if you'd like to talk to me. I'm easy. Well, no, I'm very difficult, but you should still message me. You should especially get in touch if you would make a good excuse to go visit a place that I want to see anyway. I will travel at the drop of a hat.

Or, if you're in a Bostony area and wouldn't mind meeting someone in a Providencey area who likes to drive or ride trains. The New England sense of scale doesn't register very well with me--I'm from the flatlands--but I'm gradually learning that 45 miles away seems impossibly far to most of the people around here, whereas I'm used to traveling 200+ miles for dates or the-friendship-equivalent-of-dates.

For practical purposes, if you're interested in anything on a scale between casual dating and a serious-but-secondary relationship, but your profile doesn't indicate such, you should probably let me know. Unless your profile is pretty clear about such things, I'm probably not going to make the attempt myself.

Here, I'll help. Conversation starters:

"I just read a philosophical treatise and I wanted to get into a debate for/against the author's position on some point."

"There's this great band playing near me and you seem like the type who would love to come see them with no prior planning." (this is almost universally true)

"I think you're hot. I would like to do X to your Y."

"300 blue-eyed people are on an island with one person with green eyes. There is a duck in a pond and a spherical wolf. Assuming the duck is a mallard, how long will it take... "

"I feel that a sustainable technology revolution is/is not viable because... "

"Oh my god, I love and/or hate the new Doctor SO MUCH!"

* I'm married to OkCupid's cappysay, and am seeing a nonzero number of other people. I'm... busy, and since you're probably lovely I apologize if you do write me and I can't squeeze you in. All relationships are obviously open. Thus, I'm "available", but if you're wookin' pa nub and a one-true-love-forever-behind-a-white-picket-fence-with-two-kids-and-two-SUVs type, keep walking. If, instead, you want either a) a friend or b) someone to date casually, please toss me a line.

Oh, also: I tend to take the "I'm looking for" section seriously, enough that I won't message someone if I don't fit those criteria. I know some people don't mean those to be strict limitations, but some do, and I'd rather err on the side of making fewer people uncomfortable with unwanted approaches, even if it means maybe getting laid less. This means that if you're waiting for me to message you and I don't meet those criteria, you should let me know. Or change them. Or not, as you will; I'm, as I've said, busy.

CAPTCHA: What's that book that you read and reread as a kid because it was comforting and you identified with the main character(s) and it was so close to your heart that you really just wanted to live in it? How long did it take you to wear the cover off of it? Do you still have your first copy?