I'm Irish but sound to most people as if I'm English, due to ancestry. Imagine what you will in that combination. I speak in complete sentences, sometimes with many subclauses; I digress often, especially to pun and engage in wordplay, but eventually I reach a conclusion. I give a lot of amusement to my friends - and take a lot of pleasure in life. I wake up sunny, even when it's not.

Blather, wordsmithery, rumination. According to the Boston Globe, I deserve credit for changing debates in punctuation from the apostrophe to the semicolon.

Not internet dating.

Some day anthropologists will identify this question as a hallmark of the "Emo" age. I've never asked, have you?

For what it's worth, my literary addictions are Patrick Leigh Fermor and F.L. Lucas. I think Hugh Laurie is a genius, and suspended all critical disbelief in the dying season of House. I absolutely love Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy, a tale of a 12-year old boy, his imaginary friend, and three older sisters in a small town in Ireland in 1989. Musically, I've just bought Esben and the Witch's second "album" and I am feeling nostalgic for Joy Division thanks to Peter Hook's new book. And speaking of Books, I've just read Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman, not because I'm trying to be a woman, but because she is a great writer, with a wonderfully distinctive voice; I'm wrapping up "Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe," a wonderful history of New Journalism; I'm starting "Just Kids," and I'm diving in and out of Julian Barnes' 17 Essays.

Punctuation, numbers, how to come up with metaphors and similes half as good as P.G. Wodehouse.

in the gutter but looking up at the stars, or in the stars looking for the gutter, or merely asleep.

I'm not willing to admit anything private on the Internet.

You kinda hate Internet dating - especially the questions; you get the Irish/British sense of humor; you are a conversationalist; you are an enthusiast but know the importance of not being earnest. I might as well mention one reason why you shouldn't message me: if you need someone to validate your political beliefs, whatever they may be; I like to keep an open mind and an ironic distance and I find political intensity tiring and deforming. I'm not great at replying or being proactive on this site (see Internet dating, hatred of). This is a vastly more random process that approaching strangers on the street. But I'm much too polite to do that... I'm also too old for playing mind games: Just say what's on your mind and be polite about it.