OK, I'm not seasick. (Not that I couldn't be.) But I'm a sharp, verbal, literary type with a sense of humor about myself and some perspective. Who hates filling out little boxes and answering generically attuned questions, even ones as open-ended as these, but I'll give it a shot.

Stuff I dig: music (all stripes: today, Deerhunter, Spacemen 3, Mott the Hoople, Brian Eno, Al Green, Otis Redding), books, red wine, baseball in October, parentheses, Venice, LA in general, sex, patience, modesty, affection, Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming novel, my own forthcoming novel (some days), guilty pleasures without any actual guilt, finding out I love something I didn't know I would (see under: Austen, Jane), eating expensively, having cool clothes but a job that doesn't require me to wear them, James Salter's Light Years, Saul Bellow, Tolstoy, Philip Roth at his most corrosive, artists' colonies, sleeping, hiking, sneaking a cigarette only super-occasionally when I've been drinking, vowing, quite sincerely, never to smoke again. Imperfection. Seriously. Yours, and mine.

A few things I deplore: pundits, absolutism, argumentativeness, sarcasm, rank egotism, eggs. Surely there are other things, but I'm not thinking of them just now.

I am Articulate, Seasick, and Charming

Writing & publishing novels; editing a major on-line magazine; writing a script with That Actor Who Does All Those Other Things Too; co-parenting an incredibly charming seven-year-old.

In short, a lot. And it's all a tremendous amount of fun, most of the time. A charmed life.

DJing, contemplating, writing flirtatious emails, hitting balls with sticks, listening, interpreting, teaching, thinking about becoming a better cook, skateboarding (OK, probably better in my mind at that), skiing, self-mocking, scrabble, empathizing, public speaking, editing, stumbling, maintaining grace under pressure.

Not being those people, I wouldn't know, but I'm guessing it's intelligence, eyes, general kindness of disposition.

Oh, Lord. Books: War & Peace, Moby Dick, Light Years, Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, Fortress of Solitude, miscellaneous Bellows, James Baldwin's Another Country, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Turgenev's Torrents of Spring. So, so, so many others.

The Conversation, Husbands, Chinatown, The Sting, Network. 70s golden-age stuff, basically.

Music? We'd be here all day. Curtis Mayfield, Television, pre-1973 Stones, Al Green, various Jamaican harmony trios, Big Star, that first Spiritualized record, the Faces. On and on, again.

Literature, music, sex, a sense of humor about myself, my daughter. The sixth thing can be undiscovered, for now.

Art, mortality, morality. The big questions, really.

Prone, in my pajamas? Out of my mind on whiskey and cheap speed? Seriously, what kind of question is this? Alive, fortunately, and breathing somewhere.

I'm all for embarrassing self-disclosure, but not in cyberspace. Leave me some material about which to be charming later.

These questions all seem at least a little bit beside the point.