To be perfectly up front, many people consider me to be extremely odd. I'm a linguaphilic professional storyteller. I have a masters in German Literature...for some reason. I work a night job at a grocery store because somehow being a solo stage performer/artist doesn't immediately yield great monetary rewards. I am the type of person who would rather live a good life than be wealthy.

I'm a nerd with more knowledge of ancient or foreign cultures than modern popular culture in his own country, an entertainer with hermit tendencies, and a literary type never entirely impressed by Shakespeare (or Goethe for that matter).

I like educated women with strong personalities, especially those with some expertise in the arts and humanities. If you can tell me things I don't know about the Icelandic sagas, Yiddish dialects or the political traditions of the Hittites, I'm all yours. If you can also make comparisons between Postmodernism and oral folk traditions, doubly so. My own combination of quirks and fairly esoteric interests, however, mean that I do not date particularly often. I choose quality over quantity.

As one of my friends put it, "[I] went to grad school for something completely unrelated and then became a bard." I've done the National Storytelling Conference, renaissance faires, cons and enough other stuff that I'm starting to look legitimate on paper. I'm preparing for my first tour in April, which will add a college and an art gallery to the list. I work a night job and continue to build my small, but surprisingly enthusiastic following. All because I got deported to Istanbul.

Well...I tell stories well enough to get paid for it. I'm charismatic enough to compensate for relatively poor social skills, things I cook are tasty if not particularly pretty, and I am perceptive despite being woefully unobservant. And I have a knack for finding interesting people and drawing them into intense, difficult-for-observers-to-follow conversations.

I sometimes have strong outward reactions to my internal dialogues. People often remark that I have a rather thoughtful, sometimes antiquated manner of speech. It is not unusual for people who know I perform to mistakenly think I'm doing a character when I'm just being myself.

Some items might cause me to appear to be a hipster, but I assure you that my fondness for everything listed here is quite sincere.

Books/Authors: J.M.R. Lenz, Bertolt Brecht, Jack Kerouac, the Icelandic sagas, the Nibelungenlied, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Tom Robins, American Gods, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.E. Lessing, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, House of Leaves, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, Joseph Heller, Robert Jordan, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Geek Love, China Mieville, Lullaby, Bear v. Shark.

Film: anything by Anders Thomas Jensen, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang or the Marx Brothers. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Stranger Than Fiction, Das Leben der Anderen, Sonnenallee, Clue, Oscar, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligaris, M, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, In Bruges, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Chinesisches Roulette, The Three Penny Opera, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Seventh Seal.

Music: They Might Be Giants, The Mountain Goats, Counting Crows, The Four Postmen, Marlene Dietrich, Die Ärzte, 2 Raum Wohnung, Silly Wizard, Sequentia, Lisa Hannigan, Great Big Sea, Erin McKeown, Alela Diane.

Food: Döner. I miss it every time I drink. Currywurst too. More generally I love Vietnamese and (to a lesser extent) Thai cuisine. I'll try pretty much anything though. Expanding my culinary horizons usually turns out pretty well.

Besides the necessities of life, I can't think of much I haven't done without for a while at one time or another.

Words. The music of them, that is. I think about history and performances and whose birthday I'm currently forgetting. I think about the people I know and what they mean to me. I recall good jokes and start cackling regardless of where I am, which tends to startle innocent bystanders. I think about how the people who claim to think about everything are liars, because you can only think about things you are aware of to some extent, and nobody is aware of everything. Maybe they are unaware that they are not aware of everything, which would make them no longer liars...

Depends on whether I'm working that night. If not, practicing the mandolin, playing board games, having a drink, or reading.

I think I recently reached a new level of dorkiness: while attending an Ohio Historical Society event with a friend in their little village thing, we got the musicians in the tiny makeshift dance hall to play some music to which we could dance a Scottish polka we know from renaissance faires. Upon finding we could still do it in such a small space, I high fived her. And then nobody ever thought I was cool again.

If you like slinging stories back and forth (especially over good beer), pray for movies on ABC Family to conform to tropes of bourgeois tragedy (and throw pizza at the television when they don't), love the sound of languages you don't understand, know what it's like to be a foreigner, or have a particular affinity for the simultaneously crude and eloquent: those are all good reasons. Others may also be acceptable.