I'm a big believer in fun, ideas, flexibility, friendship along myriad lines and with different types of people, pleasure and learning that comes in a huge variety of forms. Casual is my style for almost everything, even though I like some intense flavors, experiences and relationships. I accept and embody extreme juxtapositions, and I try very hard to be kind and basically decent above all.

I also find this kind of essay question disturbing, annoying, and impossible to complete without coming across sounding like some sort of flake or dangerous carnie, or possibly the kind of oversensitive weenie one wants to dope-slap into submission until one feels better about one's sad lack of tolerance for such things. Self-knowledge ain't all good news, people, and while gathering it is a critical function of adulthood I prefer to do it in private in the fetal position, or with alcohol and lifelong friends rather than as an act of public nudity. But since they insist...

Raising children and spending a lot of time with old friends as I navigate this regrouping phase. There seems to be a pool theme of late. Shooting pool, swimming pool, car pool, dating pool...lots of pool action.

I've had a number of different incarnations in my 43 years, and watch with interest to see just how the next one emerges. The others have been fairly predictable, but this one I think holds more surprises for me.

I've been a voracious reader all of my life, although I admit to taking a few months off lately. I'm pretty sure it will come back, as I can't imagine a life not surrounded by the written word.

Pinball, but it's getting to be a challenge finding a machine these days. Beyond pinball it gets a little murky.

This is a question I've been asking myself lately, and I'm not sure of the answers yet. Words tend to be a good medium for me to work with - I'm great at reading them, editing them, analyzing them, making them up, teaching them to children, spelling them, helping other people find the right ones, and on a very good day I do okay at writing them too.

Research is one of my better skills. Not in the traditional sense, perhaps, but by gathering information from a plethora of sources and synthesizing it to find what I need.

I can fix a washing machine, bake a pie, tune or rebuild an air-cooled Volkswagon, and teach a kid to swim or read. I know the right herbs for what ails you, and can read any map.

Learning new things, listening so that people feel really heard and being able to talk to almost everyone are other things I'm good at.

How would I know? They're usually too polite to tell me, of course! But based on the feedback I get, others pick up right away that I'm pretty damn smart, love to laugh, and am not terribly limited by the social conventions of behavior. Oh yes, I'm pretty sure they notice that I swear a lot. Got to work on that.

The world is full of wonderful books, and I can hardly bear to compile a limiting list like this, but you can't go wrong with anything by Christopher Moore, PG Wodehouse, Tom Sharpe, Terence McKenna, Michael Pollan, Christopher Buckley, David Sedaris, Calvin Trillin, Stephen Pinker, or Daniel Pinkwater. Cosmic Banditos is a great one, as is The Bear Went Over the Mountain, and I love the ethnobotanical collections of Richard Evans Schultes. Anything that dabbles in physics and cosmology for liberal arts majors, mythology, sociobiology, semiotics, neuropsychiatry, cultural anthropology, or linguistics is on my list. Of course, if it's liable to make me fall off the bed laughing it moves to the top of the list, and is likely to actually get read.

Movies are another story. The answer to "Have you seen...?" is "Nope." I have a huge deficit of cinematic education, but it feels like time to fill in at least a few gaping holes. I have a pathological distaste for gratuitous human drama and I love old comic masterpieces that include Peter Sellers.

Food - aahhhh yes. I'm a fan. I love spicy ethnic food, fruit, grilled meat, cookies and pie, vegetables in profusion - it's hard to go wrong with real food. Organic, or at least sustainably produced non-industrial unprocessed food is a huge deal for me, but within those parameters I pretty much like it all. Panang and the other Thai curries, tikka masala, jambalaya - these are the things I dream of, but a dinner composed entirely of steak and salad rocks just as much. If I had to pick the best food in the world it would probably be blueberries.

Music is another easy topic, as there's so much to enjoy. I like old blues, Bach and Scarlatti and a bunch of other classical composers, but the bulk of my enduring musical interests reflect my age, of course. I'm crazy about 80s/90s alternative rock. Mike Doughty, Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants, Soul Coughing, The Offspring, Flaming Lips, Pixies, Nirvana, Meat Puppets, Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Dinosaur Jr, Ramones, Radiohead, Replacements, Cake, Lou Reed, all of Bob Mould's bands, Sebadoh, Body Count, and on and on and on.

Teach me something new, why don't you? I'm always thrilled to find what I've missed but turn out to love, whether it's an author, band or food!

My sons, water to play in, people who make me laugh hard, the internets, books, novelty.

Sex, duh. I'm a mammal.

Symbols, systems, psychology. How to integrate what my kids need with what I need, what I want to add to my life now that I get to recreate it, how much these wonderful friends have meant to me over the years, what makes me laugh and attracts me, whether my love for organic red wine makes me an irritating urbane fucktard, how to synthesize my demonstrated skills with the new ones I would like to acquire, what's for dinner, who's going to finally clean this place up, when I'll feel less self-absorbed and more back to normal, what the new normal will look like, and of course wondering what YOU'RE doing and how we would like to amuse ourselves together!

The usual story. Home or somewhere else. Playing or working. Drinking or not drinking. With some other people, or one, or none.

The house I recently moved out of (and I use the past tense loosely here) is apparently some species of clown car, wherein a physically unrealistic number of objects emerge from it without it ever becoming appreciably closer to empty.

If you can teach and learn graciously, if you like that perfect blend of novelty and stability, if you love old cartoons and disdain pretentiousness, if you're a nice well-adjusted genius who is happy just hanging out some of the time, if you're willing to turn me on to new authors and physics concepts and bands and sex that I never knew I was missing out on without making me feel like an idiot, if you can use and appreciate great ideas and foul language at the same time, if you're enough of a mess to have some awareness and compassion but together enough to be functional for giving and receiving love well, if you would disown a child who aspired to be Dick Cheney, if you think it would be fun to laugh with me even though I smoke cloves and sometimes drink beer, or if you'd like to convince me I left something off this list.