Turned 30 on New Years Day. Hollywood tells me I'm supposed to respond with an emotional crisis and trip to Las Vegas in which I find myself through drink-soaked misadventure, but...no.

Born abroad of an undistinguished line of left-wing radicals, raised in the Hudson Valley, trained in various academic nonsense in our nation's capitol. Introvert-ish.

Great parallel parker on the driver's side, lousy on the passenger side. Treats coffee as dessert, not breakfast. Orchestra percussionist from high school to grad school, severely out of practice but can still follow a score if you need a timpanist. My grandma says I'm cute.

Free-associating because there's no proper format for online dating profiles. Two people independent of each other said I reminded them of Josh from "West Wing."

"You might be Ben from Parks and Rec."
"I thought I was Leslie. If we're being gender-flexible."

(Government work, aka. making New York a tax-and-spend socialist paradise.)

Telling stories; pop sociology; tambourine rolls; remembering dinosaur names; Times crossword most days but Sunday; occasional verbal cleverness.

Fiction: Snow (or anything else by Orhan Pamuk), All Men are Mortal, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Plague, All the King's Men, The Farewell Waltz, Death of a Salesman, The Palace of Dreams, Marat/Sade, Darkness at Noon.

Non-fiction: The New Jim Crow, The 30 Years War, Nixonland, Consider the Lobster, The Orientalist, Defenders of the Faith, The Lion and the Unicorn, People's History of the United States, A History of the Modern World, anything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes on his blog.
Currently reading CLR James' "The Black Jacobins." Hooked by the first sentence of the prologue.

GAMEOFTHRONESGAMEOFTHRONESGAMEOFTHRONES
Also I alternate between watching "Walking Dead" and hate-watching "Walking Dead."

"Royal Tenenbaums" is my joint.

And music: Bob Dylan, Neko Case, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Simon & Garfunkel, the Staples Singers, old men in sweaters singing Irish ballads, old men in sweaters singing Canadian ballads (Stan Rogers). All the folk songs from "Rise Up Singing," Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, or anyone else who writes about things like living under a dictator or being invaded from the west.

Websites that let you rip MP3s off Youtube (come and get me, RIAA); paper copies of books, with all due respect to the Kindle people; the New York Times; family; snow; and M&Ms. I have a serious problem with M&Ms.

The press, the criminal justice system, dinosaurs, contingency plans for zombie situations, Medicaid policy, why MASS MoCA is so far away (sadness), why the Albany metropolitan area can't support a subway system (double sadness), why "Law and Order SVU" has not yet been turned into a musical (get on it, Dick Wolf!)

I am seriously fascinated by the match questions people come up with for online dating sites. "In 'Wherefore art thou Romeo,' what does 'wherefore' mean?" This is something that could literally never come up once in a 50-year marriage. And yet, on an online dating site, it feels irrationally crucial to me that strangers get it right.

I have no emotional walls and a resulting tendency to open up to complete strangers. Not sure whether this is good or bad.

Also, on Game of Thrones I am totally rooting for Cersei.

Isn't the answer to this always "...you find my profile appealing?" Also if you're the only other person under 50 who watches "Capitol Tonight."