Hi there. Nice to meet you. Would you like some cake?

So I try not to take anything too seriously, though I sometimes fail at that. I try to learn about as many things as my brain will allow. I'm a consummate geek. There are very few topics that I won't find interesting. Except, perhaps, how big your bank account is, or how much you car costs, or how fast it goes.

I think humans have a biological imperative to learn and discover.

We are all on this one little tiny rock floating through space, and we should probably start acting like we are all in this together if we don't want to wind up as a tiny footnote in the history of the world as the destroyer of many millions of years of evolutionary development and life. Therefore I don't take too kindly to people whose only concerns are the accumulation of wealth, as it is counterproductive to the aforementioned survival of our, along with many other, species.

And I find it depressing that people are so astounded at how "good" I apparently am? I'm no saint, but helping out your fellow man and not being a selfish asshole is somehow the deviation from the norm? Do people really have to try that hard not to be a complete bastard to everyone around them? Really?? This is honestly pretty troubling to me...

Most would label me a hippie; with all the free-thinking, love everyone, peacenik, mind expanding ideas that go along with it, but don't worry I do bathe regularly enough. I try to live a life of moderation and I'd probably do well living as a Buddhist monk, but my attachment to society and all it's variety prevents me from living a life as an ascetic. I find human interaction, relationships and sex absolutely fascinating; in intellectual, physiologically, and sociological ways, as well as for the obvious reasons, and consider myself to be very sex-positive, and a feminist. Also, to complete the decathlon of hippie stereotypes, I'm a vegetarian, an absolute pacifist, I do yoga, I volunteer and plant trees.

Speaking of my hippie tendencies, I'm a fan of free love, and have little use for of the way in which society has labeled and partitioned what interpersonal relationships can be. You have a "relationship" in one form or another with everyone you know, some deeper than others, but to draw specific lines seems arbitrary and silly. The entire world of dating and marriage is a social construction based on years of misunderstanding biology, and our innate drive to label and compare things. Obviously, human connection is the most important thing in our lives, so I'm certainly not discounting it in any way. I'm just not selfish enough to want to keep someone's love just for my own; I wouldn't want to stop someone from exploring themselves in any way. Our own personas are constantly changing and evolving, so I think putting some sort of set of restrictions on that evolution is detrimental to our own growth. Seeking one particular type of relationship sets one up for disappointment, in my opinion. It's happened to me many a time: looking for what I think I want, only to be disappointed, and becoming unhappy because what I have doesn't match what I want. I'd like to think I have a more Taoist approach to relationships: go with the flow, let things evolve on their own. I am trying harder to take pleasure in the current moment, as I, like many others, have the tendency to over think things and not notice what's in front of my face.

To sum up, here is a recipe for my worldview:
1 1/2 cups free thought
shavings of postmodern analytic philosohpy
1 lb. raw uncut monist view of human conscienceness (flavored by the Multiple Drafts model)
2 teaspoons transhumanism
a dash of posthumanism
powder lightly with a skeptic mind
a men's hat full of metaphysical naturalism, with a single plum soaked in nondualism floating in it

Yeah, so all of that kind of comes off as slightly crazier than I actually am, or at least think I am. Really, though, I think sanity is a relative term and anyone can be comparatively insane next to someone else.

So, all that said, I'm just looking for new and interesting people with whom to share observations about this ludicrous world. What becomes of the relationship, I shall leave up to the chaos that is life.

Ok, there isn't any cake. I'm sorry.

Editors

• nascentself

Busy busy busy...

I currently tend to occupy my time with the following activities: work, volunteering with Trees Atlanta, playing in a gamelan, watching movies, internetting, conversing, interacting, deconstructing, overthinking, theorizing, plotting my escape, attempting to overthrow small South American countries using only laundry detergent and a really sweet Dracula costume.

I've also just gotten into a hiking kick, so any suggestions are more than welcome. I'm still pretty green, but I'm eager to learn and explore more.

Taking conversations "there", obscure references and unnecessarily useless knowledge, problem solving (logistic or interpersonal), fixing tiny loose screws, coming up with alternate theories, leading, following, generally being weird. I am also apparently good at giving hugs?

Editors

• clairechris

My sense of humor. That, or the ENORMOUS bulge in my pants.

One of those statements is in fact false.

Editors

• misscassers

a)Douglas Adams, Dawkins, Dennett, Joseph Campbell, Vonnegut, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchet, Neil DeGrasse Tyson

b)As I am a pretentious film nerd, I'll list my favorite filmmakers: Steven Soderbergh, Stanley Kubrick, The Brothers Coen, Danny Boyle, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg, Tim Burton, Robert Rodriguez, Paul Verhoeven, David Lynch, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Hayao Miazaki, Errol Morris, David Fincher, Terry Gilliam, Takashi Miike, Chan Wook Park, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

c)www.last.fm/user/penysdevyl

d)vegetarian So no meat, and by no meat, I mean no beef, poultry, fish, insect, whatever. If it is in the animal kingdom, I'm not eating it, or anything made with it. I do eat/drink dairy products, as milk is one of the only substance on the face of the planet created solely for consumption (honey being one of the others). But aside from the no meat thing, I'm totally open. If it doesn't have meat, I'll eat it. My palate seems to favor asian cuisine, so Thai, Indian are doubleplusgood.

Friends and others with which to interact, cynicism, useless knowledge, sensual stimuli(visual, auditory, tactile), the totally sweet ability to communicate and all of the varying ways in which to do so, and a 72 foot tall replica of Leonard Nimoy and Mao Tse Tsung riding a unicorn made entirely of half eaten gummi bears.

Editors

• clairechris

If it weren't for my horse, I would have never spent that year in college....

Also: memetics, metaphilosophy, ego death, deconstruction, postmodernism, SCIENCE!, the far future, the far past, moral relativism, linguistics, what animals experience as consciousness, sociology, anthropology and cultural evolution, genetics, the modern evolutionary synthesis, evo/devo, biology, neurophilosophy, ecology, the internet, technology, posthumanism, transhumanism, religion, politics, sexuality, oxytocin, free thought, shifted paradigms, the reality that I am a giant complicated machine colony of cells towering above a microscopic world while at the same time being an insignificant spec of dust on a larger insignificant spec of cosmic dust floating through space.

Breathing, with a high possibility that I am metabolizing food at least at some point, all the while slowing watching my bodies' cells replace themselves.

Actually, I'm usually chilling Friday nights as I am almost always volunteering early Saturday morning.

Editors

• misscassers

Despite what you may assume from things I've mentioned above, I do very much want to raise children, as it is, y'know, the point of life in the first place? Though, I don't necessarily need to have them myself, and would basically only want to raise them in a communal or tribal setting.

I'd say I'm a pervert, but I'm pretty sure we're all preoccupied with sex in some fashion. I mean, I don't look at porn at work or anything like that. My mind is just comfortable in the gutter.

I seem to have the somewhat miraculous ability to be both over-analytical and oblivious to things. Though the former quite often causes the latter.

And basically anything you ask me. Seriously. Anything. Give it a shot. I like talking about those things you aren't supposed to talk about.

Editors

• clairechris

You have a third arm, third eye or third nipple.

You have a vast and unending desire to learn, analyze, deduce, or grok the world around you.

Or, GOONS

I will reiterate, I am just looking for friends. If you need someone to go eat with, see a movie, whatever. I don't see the need to bring in the whole "game" of dating, as it tends to screw up things. And again, feel free to ask me anything.