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In a lot of ways, I suppose I'm all over the place. Geographically, for example, I grew up in Venezuela but moved to Boston for college and have thoroughly embraced it as home. I have lived a bunch of other places too and speak some languages. Interest-wise, I grow orchids and calla lilies. I love to sail and to ride motorcycles. I very much enjoy cooking, especially baking. I collect pocket watches, Barolos, Sauternes and cowboy boots. I think languages are fun. I hate trance and love jungle, from ambient to D&B, in varying degrees.

Academically, I just finished a combined undergrad/master's degree doing quant modeling of violence in sub-Saharan Africa. I did some qualitative work there, too, on the proliferation of small arms and light weapons (such as AK-47's) among three tribes in Kenya's North Rift. Specifically, I examined the way cultural constructs of manhood and womanhood play into the whole equation. I'm a Judith Butler fan, if you care.

I really love to read, but somehow I find it easier to read poetry than prose. My secret shame is that I now want to grow up to be an English lit professor and teach about American Modernist poetry in the early to mid 20th century. Mainly Ezra Pound, but the rest of them too. I'm working on a syllabus for a (free, no-credit) class I'm teaching next January. Don't laugh.

After I graduated I spent a couple years doing quantitative modeling for The Man, from Enron to Microsoft right on down. That was at a private economic consulting firm, calculating financial damages in litigation scenarios and playing with numbers for Big Pharma, but my heart wasn't in it. I quit, though, and for the past less-than-a-year, I've been playing director at a small company, doing quantitative risk modeling for alternative energy ventures. We'll see how that works out.

I'm still trying to figure out the whole "relationship" thing -- I married my best friend when I was 22 and she left last year. We're still best friends and hang out all the time, which is disconcerting sometimes, but it's working for both of us, so we're basically running with it.

tying bowties. halibut. tying other knots. econometrics. cooking my sushi rice all wrong.

My favourite books are also all over the place. In no particular order, I really love Steppenwolf, Les Fleurs du Mal, Things Fall Apart, Invisible Man, Timothy McDermott's Concise Translation of the Summa Theologiae, Heretics, 20 Poemas de Amor y Una Canción Desesperada, Duisener Elegien, Die Sonnette an Orpheus, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Razor's Edge, Harvest of Thorns, The Pound Era. Ezra St. Vincent Millay is my favourite poet, but I make absolutely no claims about her greatness. I spend most of my time with Pound & Friends. I'm also an unapologetic Ted Hughes fan.

I am a Nabokov fan and am currently hacking my way through King, Queen Knave, which I'm finding to be slower going than Ada, Lolita or Pale Fire. [Edit: I just finished it, and it was unsurprisingly good and worth reading but not as much so as Ada, Lolita or Pale Fire.] Books I have started multiple times but never finished: Finnegans Wake, Rayuela.

I don't own a TV, and yes, I know Stuff White People Like makes fun of me for it. I enjoy any movies from Peter Greenaway, especially Prospero's Books and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. I also like Catherine Breillat's stuff (e.g. Romance, Une Vielle Maitresse), Swimming Pool from Francois Ozon, Shortbus from John Cameron Mitchell and Y Tu Mamá También from Alfonso Cuarón. I was blown away by The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.

Music varies. We might have an interesting conversation about the way the internet is making music tastes cohere less among young people today. More people are listening to more random shit. Or at least, I am listening to more random shit, along mildly related threads. Some of these are:

the broad 80s (Guns n' Roses, Depeche Mode, David Bowie, etc.) thread

the vague Spanish rock (Heroes del Silencio, Soda Stereo/Cerati, Kinky, Elefante, Bacilos, Babasónicos, Bunbury, Caramelos de Cianuro, etc.) thread

the more tightly defined underground hip-hop (Alias, Jel, Doseone, RJD2, anything from the Anticon label, some stuff from Ninja Tune, etc.) thread

Threads I go in and out of: Nueva Trova (Silvio Rodriguez & Co.), Neo-Folk (Vetiver, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, etc.)

Natalie Merchant is my favourite singer and Ophelia my favourite album.

Bullshit pseudo-French post-poststructuralist anti-re-contra-Derrida catchword-laden language-y Baudrillard driftiness.

I should like Joyce but I don't. I've never been able to make it through anything past Dubliners.

I named my red motorcylce "Simone" after the character in Bataille's The Story of the Eye, because the idea of riding her gets me hot. Pretty bad, I know. I ride her ssc when I have a passenger and rack when I'm by myself, which should tell you something about me, too. :-) If you haven't read the book already, you probably shouldn't.

I like the TKB better than Midori, at least from a practical standpoint.