I was recently described by a Jane Austen fan as the perfect combination of Bingley and Darcy. All of the complexity and mystery of Darcy but with all of the light-hearted fun of Bingley.

After growing up in Oklahoma and living abroad post-college in Finland, I've now been in Washington, DC for over six years and am completely infatuated with the city. DC's a symbol, an ideal, a place where the highest reaches of the imagination can be climbed. And if that isn't reason enough to love living here, I don't know what is.

During the day, I work (for) the government. After, I act, sing, dance, write, and make music. I like to take photographs, but probably am not good enough to consider myself a photographer.

I don't have a "type" really, except that I really love to date women who are smarter than I am, especially if they're sassy about it. The main protagonist in the film Contact combined with the mother on Gilmore Girls is maybe my ideal woman. I've never met anyone like this, but if you are that person, please write me straight away.

Because it turns out it matters a lot, it would be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat, I like horror movies, I have travelled around another country alone, and I like the taste of beer.

I am composed of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin.

Here, you can judge for yourself by clicking each link:
* photography (Flickr)
* dancing (YouTube)
* acting (YouTube)
* filmmaking (YouTube)
* writing (LiveJournal)

Here's some testimonials my friends wrote about me back in the Friendster heyday of 2006:

"Nobody can bumpsydaisy like Clyde bumpsydaisies. I was almost embarrassed to be bumpsydaisying next to him. Clyde, you are my bumpsydaisian hero."

"clyde is the person with whom i feel completely comfortable showing the side of myself that i like best. and he brings it out whenever we're together, because he always reciprocates with the inventive, adventurous magic that i crave. i vote clyde for hetero life mate in 2006."

"Clyde is like a little kid on Christmas morning. All the time."

"the most splendid thing about clyde is that he thinks of hundreds of fabulously entertaining ideas per hour. sometimes i come dangerously close to being jealous of clyde because he's so cool, but then i recover my senses and remember that the lord giveth and in clyde's case he giveth far too much."

Radio/podcasts: Radiolab, This American Life, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, TED Talks

Books: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (yes, I realize it's horrible), White Noise by Don DeLillo, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

Movies: Casablanca, Annie Hall, The Red Violin, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Helvetica, Life Is Beautiful, Amelie, and Apocalypse Now. Also, Grease 2, Rocky 5, the The Skulls 3, and The Room. Also if they made a sequel to 12 Angry Men and called it 13 Angry Men it would automatically qualify to be in this list. I would also like to see Air Force Two and 22 Jump Street. I find the main sentiment in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to be the most inspirational message of any film ever made.

In honor of the new The Fast and The Furious sequel, simply titled Fast and Furious, I've come up with some sequels to other classic Hollywood films that I'd like to see made:
* Good, Bad, and Ugly
* Lord of Rings: Return of King
* Silence of Lambs
* Gone With Wind
* 2 Pulp 2 Fiction
* The Lawrence of the Arabia
* Shawshank Redemption 2: Tokyo Drift
* My Big Fat Greek Divorce Hearing

TV: Downton Abbey, The West Wing, Rome, Firefly, Veronica Mars, The Wire, Jeeves and Wooster, Mad Men, Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under, How I Met Your Mother

Theater I've been in: A Little Night Music, Arcadia, Dracula: The Musical?, The Mikado, As You Like It

Music: Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone, Patty Griffin, The Weeknd, Stephen Sondheim, JS Bach, Eric Whitacre, Joao Gilberto, Sufjan Stevens, Ryan Adams, Cat Power, Jason Robert Brown, Chris Thile, Lady Gaga, Girl Talk, Justin Bieber, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Drake, Sia, DJ Earworm, Astor Piazzolla

Food: Kyota sushi on the Hill, spicy Thai, Oyamel with its Mexican tapas, vegetarian Indian, Granville Moore's Belgian gastropub, Sonic ice, German beer, Clover coffee, funeral potatoes, Post Grape-Nuts, all-day brunch from Ted's Bulletin, groceries from Wegmans, Mundee's Mustmayostardayonnaise, anything extremely sour, spicy, or bitter

Question marks? Slash/stroke—oh, don't forget em-dashes and en-dashes—semicolons; and of course, ellipses...

NPR, making music, train schedules, my year spent living and working in Finland, board games, saunas, coming up with SpeakeasyDC stories, Reiner Knizia, Blues dancing, West Coast Swing, Lindy Hop, Contra dancing, how to make the perfect cup of coffee, which is the best costume at Kostume Karaoke, the Obama presidency, Tichu, The Last Five Years and how to get cast in it

A few years ago I had the opportunity to give an IgniteDC talk about why everyone should learn how to dance. So, these five minutes are pretty indicative of the kind of stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvzt56mDKOI

If you're curious about what Blues dancing is, listen to the report NPR filed on it a while back: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/20/139790041/the-healing-power-of-blues-dancing

On a quest to find the best brunch in the world. Oh wait, that's my typical Sunday morning.

Suggestions accepted, regardless!

...also, which seat should I take?

I don't really have any standards as far as where I get information from. For instance, I bought Radiohead's OK Computer the day it came out on recommendation from a MTV VJ, and I discovered my favorite author of all time, David Foster Wallace, from a book review published in Abercrombie and Fitch's clothing catalog.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence that was invented by linguist Noam Chomsky to demonstrate how a perfectly syntactical English sentence could have no meaning. Then someone, a poet I assume, named C. M. Street found a way to make it have meaning:

"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously."

Like those colorless green ideas, the beauty of the passage and its meaning grows on you the more you read it.

If you can take something that seems utterly meaningless and make it beautiful, I want to meet you.

I promise to try to do the same.

—OR—

You're new to the area and need help getting into social dancing in DC. Or you're an actor new to the area and want advice on which companies to work with.

You want to volunteer with me at Dave Eggers' new after-school writing program, 826DC.

You want to play German-style board games like Agricola or Settlers of Catan.

—OR—

If this or this moves you.