Hmmm. Where to start. Well, I have two kids, three cats, and 17 piercings (all but one in my ears). I’ve been riding horses all my life. I'm bi, but looking for a guy right now, you know, for a Relationship, although I am also happy to befriend local women. I can swear in eight languages. I grew up WASP but rejected the faith. I love the city-countryside-beach-forest-mountains. I have a really good sense of smell. I am a sometime doctoral candidate in psycholinguistics, the study of the human faculty for language. I’m a big animal lover. I eat lentil soup like it's going out of style. I’m staunchly atheist, staunchly liberal, and staunchly pacifist. I love thunderstorms. 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, and anti-inflammatory. I actually like math. I own fetishwear. I’m an ex-gymnast, a birdwatcher, a bad liar, an occasional smartass. I put the newspaper back together after I've read it. I clean up good. I’m trustworthy. I think Eddie Izzard, Margaret Cho, and Jon Stewart are all hysterical, and I would do any of them. Wait, did I just say that out loud? I have an unusual attunement to nuances of gesture and inflection, a steady drizzle of dry and sarcastic humor, a strong maternal instinct, graduate degrees in computer science and psychology, and a beloved etymological dictionary (not bugs -- that would be ENTOmology).

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

Further bulletin #1: BOTH my thumbs are opposable!

Further bulletin #2: Until further notice I actually have 3 1/2 cats. The half cat is only a half because she is not actually mine (I'm catsitting for several months), and because she is the world's biggest fraidy-cat, and she basically lives under my bed.

Further bulletin #3: The aforementioned half cat has gone home. Ignore bulletin #2.

What I’m Doing With My Life, by Me.

*ahem*

Right now I’m working on getting my butt back in grad school, either to finish my Ph.D. at Penn, which I left several years ago with great, great sadness, or to get a master's in speech pathology. Originally I was a software engineer, but now my field of study 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 my program, 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. Now I'm working as a research assistant in preparation for reapplying to school, which is a big step in the right direction. So that’s what I’m doing with my life at the moment.

The End.

Stuff with languages. Linguistics, etymologies, social observations.
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.
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.
Spelling.
People-watching.
Crossword puzzles.
Games like Boggle and TextTwist.
Making gazpacho.
Getting along with animals.
Smelling. It seems I have a sensitive nose. Good hearing too.
At the risk of sounding like a 13-year-old girl.......drawing horses.
Drawing this cool diagram that illustrates an apparent paradox in special relativity.
Oh God. Guitar Hero. There, I said it. It’s true. I kick ass.

Oh hell, how should I know. Seriously, I don't know. Good things, I hope.

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.
The Map that Changed the World. The story of the world's first geological survey. Sounds incredibly dull. Isn't.
I used to list my etymological dictionary here, but these days I almost always look stuff up online instead. So the dictionary has a status of "emeritus".
Practical Horseman, the magazine.
The Language Instinct. Seriously influential for me, so worth repeating.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The Grapes of Wrath.
Moby Dick.
The Kite Runner.

MOVIES
The Matrix. The first one, once in a great while the second.
The Lord of the Rings, all of them.
Dances with Wolves.
Gladiator.
Napoleon Dynamite.
Christopher Guest movies, especially Best in Show.
My Cousin Vinny.
About a Boy.
Raise the Red Lantern and its ilk. Looove Chinese dramas.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; House of Flying Daggers.
Secretary.
Annie Hall.
Monty Python - Holy Grail, Life of Brian.

MUSIC
Genesis. Old. Both Peter and Phil, who were great in different ways. Nothing newer than Duke. Almost nothing.
Yes.
Led Zeppelin.
Laurie Anderson.
Pink Floyd.
Coldplay.
Jethro Tull.
Peter Gabriel.
David Bowie - the old stuff.
Elton John - the old stuff.
The Beatles - duh.
Kansas.
The Roches.
Mike Oldfield.
System of a Down.
Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear, UB40, Toots and the Maytals.
J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart, Renaissance music, Brahms, P.D.Q. Bach, Scarlatti, Corelli, others.
Opera - Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, most Wagner, Donizetti, Rossini, Bellini.
Can't stand operettas, showtunes, freeform jazz, or Sinatra. Sorry.

FOOD
Middle Eastern.
Indian.
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.
Mexican.
Seafood, especially crustaceans. I think saying "crustaceans" instead of just naming them makes me a dork, but so sue me.
Less popular cuisines, like Lebanese, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Afghani, or Cambodian.
Artichokes, mangoes, cold soups, chocolate-covered espresso beans, hazelnuts, olives, pumpkin pie, dark chocolate. I actually dislike milk chocolate.
Turkey Hill non-alcoholic diet mojito green tea. You read aright: mojito green tea.
NOT beets. They taste like dirt to me, though I'm told they taste sweet to some people. This interests me.

TV
The Office. The original British one.
Project Runway and Top Chef. Inexplicably drawn.
ER.
King of the Hill.
Nearly everything on public TV. Especially documentaries. Especially nature documentaries. Especially ones with David Attenborough. Especially Blue Planet and Planet Earth.
The Daily Show.

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 - I look stuff up all the time.
Wikipedia, Google, and eBay.

My kids (girl 15, boy 12). They're so cool.
Other people. I'm inherently social, as I think most of us are.
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. I've never met anyone else who likes it as hot as I do.
A certain amount of rebellion against, or at least a slightly uneasy relationship with, or at least a questioning attitude toward, authority.
Animals. And by that I mean non-human animals.

Six, schmix.

My life and where the hell it’s going.
How to raise my kids to be happy, healthy adults despite their father, and how hard that is.
How cool my kids are.
Language and how it works.
The human mind and how it works.
Trying to be healthy. I've got a personal trainer to kick my butt now, and to date I've lost 68 pounds, so it's going pretty well, actually.
Words. Their origins, use, and subtleties.
Sex, including how I don't have enough of it.
How much I wish conservatives would stop giving Obama such a viciously hard time. I know, I know, people in hell want ice water, but that doesn't mean they get it.
“-ism”s. Racism, sexism, homophobia...ism.
When I can go riding next.

Having sushi with a friend, surfing the net, having a beer with a different friend, playing Guitar Hero or poker or some other game, seeing a movie or watching a DVD, “other”, or some combination thereof.

Besides the thing about Guitar Hero, I guess it would have to be the fact that I think Reno 911 is hysterical.

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

...if you’ve actually read this far in my profile. No pressure, just say hi. Or if you’re near(ish) my age, near(ish) my location, and several of the following: wicked smart, liberal, atheist, an excellent speller, a non-smoker, not cheating on anyone, emotionally accessible, environmentally conscious, drily humorous, open-minded, gay-friendly, and into learning. Actually, come to think of it, you pretty much have to be most of those things. Oh, and kids are fine. I mean, having them, not being them.

Smokers, Republicans, and the religious need not apply.