Hi! I'm an easygoing, thinky-type person looking for new friends around the D.C.-Md.-Va. area.

For a long time I shrugged off online dating, assuming that Web personals sites were just havens for spam bots. But two of my good friends - an amazing couple that met on Yahoo - convinced me to give it a try!

Romantically, I'm interested in relaxed, femme-leaning women who can be patient starting out with a girl who's a little shy and prone to overthinking. I'm into humor, wit and open-mindedness too.

I love biking around the city and scuba diving (not around the city), but I don't do either often enough. Want to come with?

My paid job involves things like force postures and warhead yields, but my interests extend way outside the military-industrial complex; in fact, I'm really a hippie at heart. I'm also an armchair anthropologist, a student of history and gender studies, a committed feminist and a kloset Koreaphile.

I went to journalism school at GWU and work down the street from there now, but I'm contemplating various career moves that might or might not land me elsewhere in the country or world.

I'm part Korean, but only a quarter, and I can't speak too much of the language. I'm also one-sixteenth Nez Perce Indian -- Chief Joseph is somewhere in my very extended family -- but people can't tell that from looking at me.

One book that stands out to me is Frans de Waal's Good Natured, which considers the evolutionary roots of morality by examining traits like empathy in chimps and other mammals. Reading it helped me understand that human compassion isn't some aberration from nature, but an instance of the natural world at its most complex and, I would say, most fully realized. Knowing that empathy is deeply rooted in so many species also makes me feel a bit better about living in a world that can be so brutal.

More books: Middlesex, The Things They Carried, Cold Mountain, Going After Cacciato, Lark and Termite, Life of Pi, Eros the Bittersweet (thanks for the recommendation, Marina!), What Is the What, The Perennial Philosophy, Whipping Girl, Jia (Hyejin Kim's novel on North Korean refugees) and Daniel Ellsberg's memoir "Secrets."

Some musical artists I like: Uh Huh Her, The Flaming Lips, Kaki King, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Adams, David Bowie, Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, Massive Attack, Ani Di Franco, Melissa Etheridge and the Mountain Goats. I'd love to have your recommendations, especially for albums that are new or fairly obscure. All genres are welcome!

Rather than listing a bunch of movies I like, I'll point you to Michael Wesch's brilliant videos and lectures on how online social media are transforming the ways we relate to one another: http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch.

I also like Hawaiian pizza and cookies n' cream ice cream!

Family, friends, introspection, erudition and a capacity for wonder. I'm searching for one more.