"Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it's unkind..."
--Hannah Jelks, _Night of the Iguana_

I’m loquacious with friends, easily pleased by stacks of vegetables with appropriate lighting, often distracted by glacial meadows or Sylvia Plath quotations…Once when trying to drive back to Boston I ended up in Connecticut because my passenger and I were chatting about the Categorical Imperative. I'll gladly wander galleries, taste fermented grapes, step onto heavier-than-air winged vehicles kept aloft by flimsy theories about partial vacuums, learn another language, jump off a bridge, or marry again, if the company is right.

I have my two sons with me half the time. I’m totally objective about my boys and they’re quite ordinary and they rate to win about three Nobel Prizes before they can vote. One of them already came in fourth in a ping-pong tournament.

I hope it's not arrogant or irritating to claim to be "athletic." I play lots of racquetball with the boys and x-c ski and climb things and lift other things and remove sticky jar lids in a forceful and assertive manner, well into the aerobic zone. Feel the burn.

I believe that successful long-term romance requires a deep and abundant fund of good will that grows with challenge and adversity. I believe there is a higher model of love than the "Exchange" Relationship I see everywhere, in which getting becomes expected and giving becomes begrudged. I believe in a "Gift" Relationship in which both give and nurture and support and guard without calculation, without expectation, almost without thought. I have not achieved it yet, but I hope.

I seem to do well with brainy (or ultra-brainy) women with absurdly esoteric interests who like to wear dresses sometimes even if it's not a date night. Please write to me; either way, have a marvelous day and life.

I'm a consulting biochemist who works by internet but occasionally takes time off to write articles on language, Jane Austen, or the disturbing inroads of performance-enhancing proteins into the world of classical music. Just look at the arm on that violist! I also teach systems biology and chemistry at multiple institutions of lower learning (including UW). The warmest, fuzziest professional feeling I'll ever have came when a method I invented ten years ago was used to measure therapeutic effects in a successful breast-cancer trial in 2008. I'm not sure I deserved the endorphin rush, but it was sweet.

...backgammon. Making curry. Fabricating absurd mathematical models to explain everyday events. Finding my way in the woods. Caressing feet. Avoiding crevasses on glaciers. Not getting angry. Sneaking healthful vegetables into the favorite dishes of teenagers. Raising happy kids in all other ways too. Reading poetry and wishing I'd written it. Spilling blueberries on the kitchen floor.

Most women faint because I resemble my picture and I'm exactly as tall as I claim to be. Fortunately I hold some of my best conversations with the unconscious.

Pride and Prejudice, For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Eliot, Billy Collins and Jane Hirshfield, Patrick O'Brian sea stories. Casablanca, Brazil, The Seventh Seal, Black Orpheus, A Thousand Clowns, and the guilty pleasure...Terminator. Baroque through 1900, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, an admixture of Stones and Leonard Cohen and the best 1% of pretty much anything, multiple sinuous threads of jazz, and I also play and sing and sometimes people don't run away (especially when they're unconscious).

OK, "oxygen" is a little stale. Here goes: My guitar. e e cummings. Luciferase (the enzyme that fireflies use to light up). Garlic. Mountains. Phones. No fireflies were harmed in the creation of this profile (the enzyme has been "cloned").

...can I do one of those recursive things where I say I'm thinking about this question?

...checking the dumpsters behind a five-star restaurant for a few sips of Pommard.

I put peanut butter on celery.

Press the index and middle fingers of your right hand just above the major tendons of your left wrist. Feel a throbbing? OK, message me.

I've actually received some feedback about this section. Apparently some people regard it as "desperate," rather than "amusing," as I intended it. Well fine. If you've just been released from the Women's Correctional Center in Purdy, please hold off for 24 hours.