Whew... Boy, I know a number of people applying to grad school right now, and they're always complaining about how hard it is to write a personal statement, and I'm only now starting to feel genuine sympathy.

Okay, so I'm a big nerd. I studied math in college, and three years ago I moved to New York to get a masters in math education and start teaching.

I like to read. Novels and poetry and essays and math stuff and the entire internet. Recently I put myself on a study schedule to try and learn something about quantum mechanics. It's fun trying to wrap my head around something that crazy and foreign to the world I know. And I think it's good for me.

As are people with backgrounds I know nothing about. If you're passionate about some random field of knowledge, I want you to talk to me about it and wave your hands around excitedly.

I love exploring this city. Even though I've been here for a while now, I still regularly look out my window and say "Gawl darn thas a big ol' city." Work's been keeping me pretty busy lately, but I want to go to more museums and shows and lectures and concerts and restaurants and just walk around on the streets.

And I want someone to share it with.

I work at a transfer school. It's kind of a second-chance high school for kids who have already dropped out of high school once but have yet to turn 21 and "age out" of the system, so they can still get a diploma. It's in the South Bronx. It's challenging and fun and exhausting and weird.

Math?

I actually don't know if I'm "really good" at anything. I'm something of a dabbler who's accidentally picked up some competencies. Becoming a math guy was like that. It could have been a whole host of other things. Which is not to say I don't love math. It's beautiful.

Other skills...

I can juggle two balls in one hand. And jump pretty high. And make an amazing cheese plate.

I used to have quite a reputation for my home-made fireworks. But I've prudently tabled that hobby since moving to the city.

I like to think that I'm a decent writer.

I'm pretty good at over-thinking simple questions.

Dunno.

I'm told I have very expressive facial expressions, so sometimes people know that I'm bewildered or amused or suspicious before they know my name.

I've heard some really funny jokes in my day. Real side-splitters. But when people around me start telling jokes I can never think of one. I feel like I'm the same way with books/movies/music. I've come across some great stuff, but when you actually ask me, all I can think of is that one about the chicken.

...Okay, looking at other people's profiles helps me remember authors I love. Man, making a list like this really makes me wish I still had time to read as much as I used to. Anyway:

Italo Calvino, Ray Bradbury, Robert Frost, Annie Dillard, Vonnegut, Sedaris, Nabokov, Borges, Steinbeck, Salinger, Heinlein, Hunter S. Thompson, Kafka, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Orwell, Pynchon, Tolkien, and Faulkner all blow me away in one way or another. Even if I had to see someone else mention them to remember that.

Movies: I like anything that avoids that horrible middle ground between wanting to be smart and succeeding and trying to be dumb and succeeding. Half-baked profundities are really painful. I'm not much for slapstick or movies where Bruce Willis has that one little cut above his eye for the whole thing. There are exceptions.

Music: I'm pretty ignorant about music. I like it, it makes me happy, but I'm must have missed school on the day when they taught us the vocabulary to talk about music. So I end up just going in for lyrics that make me smile. Josh Ritter, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Magnetic Fields, that kind of thing. Not that I don't like stuff without self-conscious lyrics too, mind you. I just don't know how to explain what I like about that other stuff. If someone wants to teach me...

Food: Oh, Sweet Jesus. That's one of the things I love most about this city. I tend to be the guy that goes to a restaurant where I know they have something I love, but then I see something on the menu I can neither pronounce or define, and I'll say "yeah, I'll have that." I like surprises. And you can always find a surprise in NY.

1. Pen and paper (my short-term memory is abominable)
2. Reading material
3. An internet connection, sadly
4. The stash of Cup Soup in my desk drawer at work
5. Regular pilgrimages to the Out of Doors
6. Six more wishes

Lately? About how we raise our children, as a society. And what the world's going to look like in ten, twenty, thirty years. And what I'd study if I let myself get another degree in something new. And if there's some way to harness the kinetic energy in warm air to make an air conditioner that runs itself. And how more communication doesn't always seem to lead to more understanding, and what we should do to fix that. And if anyone would read about a nudnik like this and want to hang out with him.

okcupid's policies on uploading pictures taught me that the plural of vagina is "vaginae" (As in "you're not allowed to upload pictures of"). Not a word I'd heard before.

And I found it kind of titillating.

You want to.