If you're an under-30 male or a couple looking for a third, or if you're not ridiculously intelligent, highly educated, and atheist/agnostic, please don't message me. Otherwise, forge ahead, intrepid reader!

So here's an introduction that has, shall we say, a dearth of gravitas. I have two kids, three cats, and 19 piercings (all but one in my ears). I’ve been riding horses all my life. I'm bisexual, and most of my relationships have been with guys, but I could go either way at this point. I'm a consummate intellectual, but also a consummate goof. For example, I can speak eight languages.....if by "speak" you mean "swear in". I'm a dedicated mom. I grew up with upper-crust-y parents, but I've reverted towards the mean. I wish I lived in the city, but the public schools just don't cut it. I'm into self-examination. You know, emotional/philosophical self-examination, not physical...not that there's anything wrong with that. It bugs me when drivers yield their right of way to me to try to be nice, because it's safer to do what other drivers expect. I used to be a tomboy, and I still wield a mean power drill, but I clean up good. I eat very little meat. I am a former doctoral candidate in psycholinguistics, the study of the human faculty for language. I’m a big animal lover. I am NOT a morning person. I’m staunchly atheist, staunchly liberal, and staunchly pacifist. If you're not atheist or Buddhist or irreligious, it's probably best if you're at least agnostic, or lapsed, or at least disillusioned. I like falling asleep in a thunderstorm. I’m nerdy in the sense of loving science and learning. I carry bugs outside instead of killing them. I have perfect pitch. Wait, no I don’t. But I am musical, pedagogical, low-calorie, and fade-resistant. I actually like math, and I actually go to the opera. Like kind of a lot. I've definitely struggled with my share of adversity. I own fetishwear. I’m an ex-gymnast, a birdwatcher, a good secret-keeper, a bad liar, an occasional smartass. I'm naked under my clothes. I refold newspapers and umbrellas when I'm done with them. I think Jon Stewart, Ricky Gervais, and Margaret Cho are all hysterical, and I would do any of them. Wait, did I just say that out loud? I'll work on the formatting of a Word document for hours to get it juuuuust right. I love Britcoms, and science and nature documentaries. I have an unusual attunement to nuances of gesture and inflection, a steady drizzle of dry humor, a strong maternal instinct, graduate degrees in computer science and psychology, and a slight obsession with etymologies. Where by "slight" I mean "more than slight".

Ways to make me dig you:
Be smart. Really, really smart.
Be polite.
Answer my questions thoughtfully, and be in the habit of introspecting.
Be interested in how people work.
Be amazed at the natural world.
Spell well.
Be interested in learning new things of alllll sorts.
Be compassionate.
Be comfortable with who you are, so that you neither need to flaunt it nor justify it.

Things other people sometimes do (not you, surely, dear reader) that underwhelm me:
Talk incessantly about themselves.
Be arrogant.
Think more about how they appear to people than about who they really are.
Bring up the topic of sex when we barely know each other.
Be set in their ways.
Refer to adult females as "girls".

Further bulletins as events warrant! And I’m pretty sure events will warrant!

Further bulletin #1: BOTH my thumbs are opposable!

Further bulletin #2: There used to be Further Bulletins up to #5, but really, they were boring.
.....And we're walking! We're walking!

What I’m Doing With My Life, by Me.

*ahem*

As of fall 2010 I am back in grad school full time, for a master's in speech pathology at Temple University. Originally I was a software engineer, but then I found a field of study I actually loved, which is psycholinguistics: the study of the human capacity to learn, comprehend, and produce language. I’m a natural at it, and it devastated me to have to leave the doctoral program I started at Penn, but I just couldn’t juggle all the personal things that I had to manage in my life, including getting divorced, and school was the only thing that could give. That was several years ago. Things are going a lot better these days, which is all good. The move to speech pathology instead of psycholinguistics was the result of my increasing frustration with the lack of emphasis in my old Ph.D. program on actually making a difference in real people's lives. So that’s what I’m doing with my life at the moment.

The End.

Oh, and the more time passes, the more Buddhist I become, except for the whole supernatural hero-worship part. I love the idea that no matter who you are right now, no matter where you are or what you do, it's OK. That doesn't mean you might not want to change anything about yourself or your life, but it does mean that there is no need to pass judgment on yourself all the time, which is very freeing.

Stuff with language, and languages. Linguistics, etymologies, social observations. Lately, learning Spanish.
Horseback riding. The jumping-over-fences kind. Been doing it all my life, and it’s very near to my heart. If we become friends, you’re going to have to go for a ride with me at some point. I'll make it fun, I promise.
Psychology stuff. Not the kind where you have to worry about what you say, or worry that I’ll ask you about your mother. More like how our brains and minds work in general. Evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, neuro/biopsychology.
Hanging out at an outside table at a restaurant on a warm summer night and people-watching. I'm awesome at that.
Hanging out anywhere and people-watching.
Crossword puzzles, anagrams, puzzles in general, word games, Sudoku.
Making gazpacho and chili. Not in the same meal.
Getting along with animals.
Smelling. It seems I have a sensitive nose. Good hearing too.
At the risk of sounding like a dreamy 12-year-old girl.......drawing horses.
Drawing this one cool diagram that illustrates an apparent paradox in special relativity.

Oh hell, how should I know. Seriously, I don't know. Good things, I hope. Since I genuinely don't know, please allow me to take this moment to provide a favorite quote: "The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple, unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry." (Richard Dawkins) For those to whom that sentence is not a limpid pool of clarity: the reason blind faith even exists in the world at all is that blind faith dictates that thou shalt not examine matters of blind faith too closely.

OK. This list used to be really, reeeeeally long, but I've decided not to punish the readers who made it this far by making them read the whole damn thing. So believe it or not, this section is a lot shorter than it used to be.

BOOKS
The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. The foundation of my intellectual life. Also The Stuff of Thought by the same author, about how language reflects the way humans think.
The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable and other Richard Dawkins books.
Anything by Deborah Tannen, the sociolinguist.
Practical Horseman, the magazine.
The Grapes of Wrath.
Moby Dick.
The Kite Runner.

MOVIES
The King's Speech (latest addition -- great movie even if I weren't into speech pathology)
The Matrix (the first one, once in a great while the second), The Lord of the Rings (all of them).
Dances with Wolves, Gladiator, About a Boy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Napoleon Dynamite, Christopher Guest movies (especially Best in Show), My Cousin Vinny, Annie Hall, Monty Python's Holy Grail, Life of Brian.
Raise the Red Lantern, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers.

MUSIC
GENESIS, the old stuff only. Both Peter and Phil, who were great in different ways.
Yes, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, The Beatles (duh), Kansas (but not the stuff you hear on the radio).
Laurie Anderson.
Did I mention Genesis?
Peter Gabriel, David Bowie (old stuff), Mike Oldfield.
Coldplay, The Roches, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Dream Theater.
Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, UB40, Toots and the Maytals.
J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart, Renaissance music, P.D.Q. Bach, Scarlatti, Corelli, others.
Opera - Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, most Wagner, Donizetti, Rossini, Bellini.
Can't stand showtunes, freeform jazz, or Sinatra. Sorry. Oh, and Christmas songs, you know, the crappy ones you hear on the radio. Hate them hate them.

FOOD
Middle Eastern, Indian, Mexican; less popular cuisines like Lebanese, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Afghani, or Cambodian.
Anything so spicy that your eyes and nose run. You've never met anyone who likes their food as spicy as I do.
Sushi. Sashimi, mostly.
Seafood, especially crustaceans. I think saying "crustaceans" instead of just naming them makes me a dork, but so sue me.
Artichokes, mangoes, cold soups, dark-chocolate-covered espresso beans, hazelnuts, olives, pumpkin pie. I actually dislike milk chocolate.
NOT beets. They taste like dirt to me, though I'm told they taste sweet to some people. This interests me.

TV
The Office (both the original British one and the American one), King of the Hill, Frasier.
Documentaries. Especially nature documentaries. Especially ones with David Attenborough. Especially Blue Planet and Planet Earth.
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

OTHER STUFF
NPR, and lots of it. Car Talk, This American Life.
Homestar Runner (homestarrunner.com). Hys, freakin', sterical.
Armchair astrophysics.
Language translation and etymology sites, especially wordreference.com and etymonline.com. I look stuff up all the time.
Wikipedia, eBay, and PayPal. And of course Google.

"Never" is such a strong word. Let's say these are things I really, really don't want to do without.

My kids (girl 17, boy 14). They're so cool. The "never" does actually apply here.
Someone to have sincere conversations with, and share things with.
The study (formal or informal) of language, alllll aspects.
Horseback riding. Good for the soul, and great exercise. Seriously.
Music. Old Genesis alone could probably sustain me indefinitely.
Mirth. Isn't that a great word? Mirth.
Separation of church and state.
Really, really, really spicy food.
A certain amount of rebellion against, or at least a slightly uneasy relationship with, or at least a healthily skeptical attitude toward, authority.
Animals. And by that I mean non-human animals.

My kids complain that I love my iPad more than I love them. But that's ridiculous........right?

Six, schmix.

Life, the nature of the universe, and the nature of being human. How to create more happiness in myself, other people, and the external world.
How to raise my kids to be happy, healthy adults despite their father, and how hard that is.
How awesome my kids are.
Language and how it works.
Trying to be healthy.
Sex, including how I don't have enough of it.
What the right thing to do is.
When I can go riding next.

Lingering over dinner with a friend or friends; maybe having a drink here or there; sometimes going to an opera or a concert; playing bad piano; seeing a movie or watching a DVD; “other”, or some combination thereof. Or something else. Yep, that pretty much covers it.

Umm, hmm. Occasionally I think Reno 911 is a riot. In between thinking it's really offensive.

Ooh, I know what's even more private: I like it rough. <*ahem*> Guess it's not so private any more.

"Should" is so value-laden. You make your own decision. But setting that aside, basically you "should" message me if EITHER you'd like to discuss something I wrote about in my profile, OR you're near my age/location, crazy smart, kind, non-religious, and comfortable with introspection.
But please, please, DO NOT message me if you just thought the corset pic was hot and you're hoping I'll go out with you. I won't. I'm picky, and I won't make an exception for you.

Please do message me if you are (as many as possible of) the following: near(ish) my age, near(ish) my location, wicked smart, liberal, atheist, highly educated, a non-smoker, not cheating on anyone, emotionally accessible, an excellent speller, environmentally conscious, drily humorous, open-minded, gay- and otherly-gendered-friendly, and into learning. Oh, and kids are fine. I mean, having them, not being them.

Smokers, Republicans, and the religious need not apply.