I was talking with a friend of mine who was looking for an apartment, and of his potential roommates he said, "I'm looking for hippies, but sensible hippies. I'm totally down with chickens in the backyard, but not so much with the crystal healing."

This is pretty much where I'm at with my social life. I'm a fair-trade vegan eco-socialist treehugging citizen of the People's Republic of Cascadia, heck yeah, but I'm also an anti-drug, Temperance-minded, intensely secular, pro-monogamy scientist. These things are mutually reinforcing; I get all sorts of excited about rigorously applying cost-benefit analysis and the Precautionary Principle to my everyday life, in order to hit as accurately as I can that tradeoff between Epicureanism and responsibility to myself and this Pale Blue Dot.

In this, I'm like a lot of other organisms that developed in stable environments without many natural predators. We focus on quality over quantity, and consume with the assumption that our grandkids will feel the effects of our choices. You could say I'm living like a big flightless island pigeon, but you could also say I'm living like a komodo dragon, which sounds way more badass.

I am wonky, wonkish, and a bit of a wanker.

I'm also a firm believer in Honest Indicators of Fitness, though apparently OKCupid and I disagree on this, as they've done away with their Awards section. So, I saved my awards (as well as the ones I gave) in my Journal. Don't take my word on me, read what other people have said here.

My life wavers between ridiculous children's story and bad sitcom.

I'm a suburban Chicagoland émigré who spent a couple years dwelling in the forests of Evergreen's Thousand Acre Wood, dwelling in a tent on a promontory overlooking the Eld Inlet of the Salish Sea (yeah, all you dudes who answered "Kissing in a tent, in the woods" as your preferred romantic activity, I so have that niche cornered). From this homebase, I attended class at the Evergreen State College, coauthored papers on evolutionary theory (right now I'm working on a few on the evolution of homosexuality, homophobia, slavery, conservation, the desire to keep pets, and dinosaur mating systems), helped coordinate our organic farm's Community Gardens, painted murals, did freelance RAing, played Hobbes to my professors' kid's Calvin, and acted as a resident Trickster Figure for much of campus.***

Basically, I'm either Baba Yaga without the ovaries, or Thoreau with them.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING DISCLAIMER: Product is nowhere near as awesome as that last sentence implies.

If you want to see what memes are currently buzzing loudest in my mind, you can check out my twitter or my Google Plus.

I've been teaching myself some hatha yoga to compliment my health and wellness regimen, but would love to work with someone who who knows what they're doing.

***I'm still doing most of these things, but have re-domesticated myself from my feral state. I'm doing a pretty good job of it; the house I live in now is gorgeous, with an a beautiful veggie garden and greenhouse (we're getting chickens!), an heirloom cat named Scabs, and a wonderful assortment of kind and talented roommates. Still, being away from that very direct connection you have with your sense of space when your movements are literally dictated by the tide, and you daily navigate through whatever is growing strongest in that part of the season, is hard, sometimes; the Call of the Wild is strong.

giving life-affirming hugs and eating things I find on the ground without getting sick.

I'm, um, not very subtle. A well intentioned friend decried this:

"People like mystery, they like the thrill of the chase. They will appreciate you more if they think they have to work harder to get you. Think of gay men as a pack of wolves. You're the Limpy Elk."

I pointed out that in fact wolves would specifically pursue Limpy Elk, because it was much less effort to capture and turn into baby wolves. Somehow, this did not convince him of my universal allure. Clearly he must have misunderstood my argument.

Speaking of arguments and a lack of subtlety, I am a loud and verbose gentledude. Apparently my extended answer to the "how many continents are there" question inspired a friend to make a metafilter post about okcupid profiles, which is now the first thing that a significant percentage of my profile visitors first notice about me. Which is flattering? Hi, Mostly Straight and Female Metafilter People!!!

...otherwise, people notice my height. I stopped growing in Seventh Grade.

Books: I'm a total Bibliophibian, but I tried to restrain my book lust to to an unranked list of eighteen favorite authors.

Fiction:

*Octavia Butler________________Theodor Seuss Geisel*
*Ursula K Le Guin___________________Kurt Vonnegut*
*Margaret Atwood__________________Sherman Alexie*
*Samuel Langhorne Clemens__________Nalo Hopkinson*
*Paulo Coelho_____________Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni*
*Virginia Woolf_______________Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
*Carlos Fuentes_____________________James Gurney*
*Bill Watterson____________________Brian K Vaughan*
*Diana Wynne Jones____________________Jon Cairns*

Nonfiction:

*Charles Darwin_______________Terry Tempest Williams*
*Gerald Durrell__________________Henry David Thoreau*
*Jared Diamond_______________________Tim Flannery*
*Tariq Ali____________________________Howard Zinn*
*E.O. Wilson______________________Thich Nhat Hanh*
*Ed Yong_________________________Ta-Nehisi Coates*
*Richard Dawkins_____________________Chris Hedges*
*Adam Hochschild_____________________Steve Mithin*
*Douglas Adams________________________Carl Sagan*

Movies: I always love a good Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn flick, but "Ferngully: the last Rainforest" is probably both my favorite and the most influential movie in my life. Which, uh, says something pretty specific about me. Otherwise, a representative spread would look something like:

*Alien___________________________________Amélie*
*Goodbye Lenin!___________________Some Like it Hot*
*Angels in America____________________Grey Gardens*
*Read or Die______________________________Babies*
*D.E.B.s________________________________Tideland*
*Dark City______________________Sita Sings the Blues*
*Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind_______Lilo and Stitch*
*Jurassic Park_____________________Boys on the Side*
*Moon________________________________Tank Girl*

Shows: Like most folks in my demographic, I haven't owned a TV in years, so while I have irregular binges of Democracy Now!, Deep Space Nine, or David Attenborough, I think there are better uses for this space.
How about Sixteen Places I Most Want to Visit?

*Michoacán Monarch Biosphere Reserve___________Tikal*
*Bhutan______________________________Angkor Wat*
*Socotra_______________________________Patagonia*
*New Zealand____________________________Komodo*
*Kangaroo Island___________________Aleutian Islands*
*Okavango Delta_________________________Virungas*
*Mali's Festival in the Desert___________Huon Peninsula*
*Barcelona_________________________________Titan*

Music: A representative sampling. I linked to songs for each artist:
*Team Awesome!___________________________Dar Williams*
*Lauryn Hill_____________________________Murder by Death*
*Tracy Chapman_____________________________Indigo Girls*
*The Weakerthans_________________________Césaria Évora*
*Fifteen__________________________________Northern Rail*
*Slapstick___________________________Fishtank Ensemble*
*Grabass Charlestons__________________Polka Dot Dot Dot*
*Joni Mitchell______________________________Ani Difranco*
*Joanna Newsom____________________________Neko Case*
*Igor Stravinsky______________________________Yat Kha*
*Ozomatli____________________________________Loketo*
*Nina Simone____________________________Saul Williams*
*Balkan Beatbox________________________________Leeni*
*Alice Coltrane__________________________________Björk*
*Flogging Molly_________________________Kayhan Kalhor*
*Gogol Bordello_________________________Dobet Gnahoré*
*Cibo Matto_____________________________Yann Tiersen*
*Sleater-Kinney______________________________Bon Iver*
________________*Yerba Buena*____________________

Or you could just check out my Last.fm profile.

Food: Nori. Chocolate. Curry. Kale. Cactus Pears. Berbere. Starfruit. Chipotle. Peanut Butter. Wasabi. Rainier Cherries.
I recently and with increasing enthusiasm began learning how to subsistence cook, so a great way to curry favor with me is to send me a good, easy vegan recipe.

1. Dogs.

2. My Ex Boyfriends, the scruffy, scrappy, winsome, and wise Dreujnk, M1A1, who is a dapper, kind, witty anachronism of a man, the sweetly brilliant physicist, transit advocate, and Tacoman extraordinaire SocialistGuy, and DangerTurnip, who is such a great friend and powerful ally that he's on this list despite the fact that we never entered into a romantic relationship. They are all my best friends and I highly recommend each of them.

3. Books (I don't drink or do any other drugs, and I'm not religious, so I need SOME form of escapism)

4. Kakapos. Do I identify too much with a giant, naive, pudgy, leaf-eating green parrot that thinks it can fly but can't and whose mating system's major feature is its lack of success? You bet!

5. Art, even (especially?) if it's just rearranging stones and leaves.

6. The Scientific Method!

something Bret Weinstein said: "Every species is a unique, successful answer to at least one question. Our challenge is to find out what the questions are."

I find myself applying this to all products and byproducts of natural selection: political systems, biases, religions, commercials, pop songs, poetry, fashion, psychoses, etymologies, architecture, pictures of cats on the internet. Especially pictures of cats on the internet.

Douglas Adams was right. We've got all the answers we will ever need. Come and help me find the questions!

. Which is pretty awesome, if you ask me.

I openly admire Dian Fossey and Thomas Huxley, and more privately admire Carry A. Nation, a lot, for similar reasons.

I think Dan Savage is the epitome of what is wrong with the West Coast and people who emigrate there. I want to write a book called "The Unethical Slut" about the virtues of monogamy and the evolutionary, chemical, and social reasons to let hookup culture die with Beards and the Hankie Code.

Along that same vein, I did not care for Shortbus.

No ifs; you just should! I enjoy with equanimity probing debates that question the fundamentals of my ethics, breathless conversations where we spend the entire time exuberantly agreeing at each other, and deep explorations of the costs and benefits of hijacking flying cars in a seatbelt suit.

Somehow that came out sexier than I intended. I regret nothing.

I am Magnificent.Mihirung on Google Chat and MSN, if the chat medium here prohibitively frustrates you. Come say hi!

I'm especially looking for both Non-Drinking Buddies and godless, leftist, bookish, substance-free extroverts right now, neither of which I currently have on my FriendRoster.

If you are a queer paleontologist and/or evolutionary biologist you should message me now. Nower! Stop not messaging!