I'm a high-functioning dork.

(I've gone through a lot of rewrites of this self-summary and am yet to find one that I like; hence the brevity.)

Working for a large internet search company headquartered in Mountain View. Seeing how I like that. If I like it, well, that settles the career and financial aspects of my life, and I'll move on to other matters. If I don't, I'll probably head to grad school so that I can eventually get an ivory tower all my own.

English mechanics (grammar, spelling, etc.). Freecell, Minesweeper, and other single-player games of complete information. Maths. Affecting interesting word usage. Self-reference.

I think the creators of OKC may have put this question in just to let you see how people respond to questions they don't have a good answer for. Because honestly, how many people actually know the answer to this? And of those, how many provide some worthwhile answer that isn't "my eyes", "my smile", "my tits", "my ass", etc? From what I've seen, not many.

So now you know: when I'm posed with a stupid question I can't provide a good answer for, I may push back on the question. If you disagree about the utility of this question on its face, then look at my pictures (or take me out on a date) and tell me what you notice.

The answer to all four is Fried Green Tomatoes (and the soundtrack thereof).

If you understood that reference (euphemism for "stolen joke"), then you have a good guess as to one of my favorite TV shows.

Anyhow, the real answer is that I'm not very passionate about any of those things, and I think many people factionalize too much over genres of art. I'll give a few examples though.

Books: Sci-Fi and Fantasy, particularly good stuff like Asimov and trash like Mercedes Lackey.

Movies: Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Purple Rose of Cairo, Y tu mamá también

Music: I've recently started using Pandora, which is wonderful because it means I don't have to know what I like in music. I will (and do) listen to almost anything, though I'm not a fan of things that are particularly angry or whiny. I prefer music with intelligible intelligent lyrics.

Food: Does anyone look at someone's profile and say "omigosh, they like {food x}?! I could never be with them!"? If you can imagine yourself doing that, please pretend I listed {food x} here. And if you really want to know, I like Italian quite a bit.

Most people list around one interesting thing here, so I'm fleshing out the interesting one quite a bit:

Reference materials. I have an idle curiosity that I sate whenever I can. Wikipedia and the OED are wonderful things.

As an example, I was just reading and encountered the word "ptomaine," with which I was unfamiliar. I stopped to look it up in Wikipedia. It had only a short blurb explaining that the word is obsolete, which piqued my interest as to what the OED would say. I looked it up there (where they don't admit its obsolescence). Then, since I was there and the word was so odd, I checked its etymology (which is, indeed, odd). This referred to its pronunciation, which I checked. Now I know how to pronounce it most correctly (hint: 3 syllables). It also occurred to me while writing this that I finally understand another line from "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah."

As to the other five things, well. . .
the internet, cheese, time alone, something to manipulate absent-mindedly while I think, and flowing water.

Consciousness. Inasmuch as I am spiritual, that is the subject. As related subtopics, I consider free will, moral responsibility, the anthropic principle, identity, artificial intelligence, etc.

Dualism is a bit too magical, physicalism was pretty much disproven by Descartes, and epiphenomenalism is depressing. So it's a serious problem. I plan to solve that problem (of consciousness) before facing the fact that I have no good argument against hard incompatibilism (lack of free will), skepticism (lack of knowledge), and the ontology of morality (lack of good and evil). So obviously I don't spend *enough* time thinking about these things.

Outside of philosophy, I'm really interested in information density (i.e. Kolmogorov Complexity). For instance, did you know that the vast majority of real numbers are completely indescribable? In my view, there's no compelling sense in which any individual one of these infinitely-complex numbers even exists. Fortunately, no one has ever referred to one of them specifically in the history of mathematics - since you can't. I don't see why we need them. If we threw them out we could limit cardinality to aleph null, which strikes me as a pretty big benefit.

Oh, and uh, no, I'm not a total nerd, really, I also think about, uh, sex? Sports? Crap, I think you're on to me.

Usually getting back into a video game or book that I've been too busy to get to during the week. Possibly at a party, though my lack of a car makes staying out late frustratingly difficult.

Admitting something here makes it substantially less private than it was before. This causes whatever was previously the nearly-most-private thing to become the most private, instead of the thing that was admitted here. Therefore, it is impossible to admit the most private thing that I am willing to admit.

The not-overthought answer is that I have a bit of an oral fixation.

Editors

• JamesTyrell

* You understood most of my profile.
* You use proper punctuation on the internet.
* You want to try to convince me that 'internet' should always be capitalized.
* You don't list anything by Ayn Rand in your favorite books.
* You do list something by Ayn Rand in your favorite books and can convince me that her philosophy doesn't totally neglect her first principles right after she establishes them.
* You just finished wondering whether this list is meant to be joined by 'and' or 'or'.
* You'd like to be my friend.
* You might like to be my lover.

I'd hoped I could leave it unsaid, but you should heed the Standard Creepiness Rule for dating people younger than you. Check cansleepwith.com . If you fall outside its guidelines for me, you're very unlikely to get a reply. Sorry.

Editors

• Seyrr