[Note: If I haven't responded to your message, it's because my life is off the map right now, not because I don't like you. I'll write back soonish.] [Update: I might not write back soonish, but that's because I suck, not because you do. And sometimes the inbox for okcupid just gets daunting]

For god's sake, okcupid, I just want to write down favorite foods right now and you make me do my self-summary?

Liberal, feminist, raised by new-age hippies.

I love visual arts, acting, directing, yet somehow will be teaching science for a living. Go figure. [Update for Autumn 2009: actually nope - totally different job now]. Hope to settle on what I really want to do "when I grow up" eventually, but have a dreadful track record of never making up my mind.

I have a small obsession with directing, acting and reading Shakespeare - I've acted in or directed at least one full-length Shakespeare play every year since 1992.

In college my big academic interests were anthropology, neuroscience and evolution.

Right now, I'm pretty excited to have ended up in NYC. 3 1/2 months in, I'm still loving exploring new neighborhoods on foot, and anyone who'd like to poke around unexplored corners of Brooklyn with me. So much neat stuff, particularly in the food arena, budget and appetite allowing.

I find wherever I am, what makes me happiest is time spent with good friends, new or old. Since I picked up and left the city (Philadelphia) and circle of friends that I was used to for the last seven years simultaneous to the job, apartment and relationship in which I spent those seven years, I'm looking to make friends of the new variety in this new city.

I like to cook with friends, or make ice-cream, but rarely bother getting fancy for myself.

For meditative, lost-in-the-process, in the groove, single-minded immersion (anyone familiar with the psychological concept of 'flow?'), I'll sculpt in clay. Or ski (love to ski, usually way too fast and straight down the hill). I also get the same from acting certain roles (usually Shakespeare). Or, for that matter, sex with chemistry. But the last two both require partners.

Also reacquaint myself with the concept of dating - I've recently [getting less recent] emerged from 13 years of living as one half of a couple. That said, trying not to let myself do the serious relationship thing again for a while. I say "trying" on account of my natural tendency of getting very close very fast and ending up essentially married for at least half a decade. History also suggests I figure out what other people want without a clue what I do, and that I'm a real sucker for any lady who thinks I'm pretty.

So, what am I doing here? Upon careful reflection, the primary thing I'm looking for now is taking-things-slow, emotionally casual hanging out. [Update Sept 2009: getting used to dating now. A little more open to anything. But, disclaimer: after spending ages 17 through 30 in two entirely monogamous entirely faithful marathon relationships I am not jumping into one again. Dating's great, actual love and emotional intimacy even better, but only in the open configuration at this moment]

[2008]: I've spent the last six years teaching and directing Shakespeare to students in high-school. Now I'm having my "not in my twenties anymore" life crisis. We'll see where I land.
[June 2008] Last seven years of my life spent in long-term monogamous relationship that has, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, slowly collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. Eddie Izzard and haagen-daz marathon shortly to commence, after I've finished distracting myself with writing this.
[June 2008 Update: the Hagen-Daz is over. And I am going to be in between Berkeley and LA from June 25th until July 8th or so. Oh, also I've officially moved from straight up "single" to "single, but it's very very very complicated..."]
[November 2008 Update: it's not complicated anymore, but I now know the meaning of "heartbreak" of "rebound" and of bizarre love triangles a lot better. On a brighter note, I canvassed for Obama in Cleveland for the week up to the election, and got the nice side effect of forgetting my heart had it's ass kicked by being part of something much bigger than my messed up love-life. YES WE DID! Friggin sad over prop 8 in CA though. ]
[Feb 2009 Update]: after a stint in NYC, I've decided to get a job in the city and live there. At the moment this entails crashing in my rural hometown of origin (aaaah, I have not become a townie!) while I work on lining up said job.]
[April 2009 Update]: . . . . and I've been offered a job as a science teacher for the NYC Teaching Fellows. Not my subject of choice, but I feel good about the cause, and about finally getting to settle in NYC. I hope I'll find out which borough soon. Hoping for Brooklyn. In the meantime, I'm staying in a variety of locations... [May 09 update: Brooklyn!]
[Sept 2009: After cooling my heels due to the NYC DOE hiring freeze all August I realized, if there aren't even enough positions for the teachers that have been recruited, and I don't like teaching science anyway, I might as well go with plan B: a new kind of job with a flexible schedule that lets me do other things I enjoy.
Oct 2009: I was back to "single, but it's very very complicated..." for a while, but no longer.
10/15/09: Started with a ceramic studio today. Nice to get my hands in clay again. Got to stop licking my finger smooth out what I'm sculpting - dried clay lips look a bit silly. And who knows how much of it I end up ingesting. Mmm... grog.

Teaching and Directing Shakespeare.
Academics. Standardized tests.
Costume design (for theater), I have discovered in recent years.
Making things with my hands that should have never worked because I don't know what I'm doing but somehow come out surprisingly awesome. Well, sometimes they do.

I also seem to be accomplished at staying friends with my exes. But not in a bad way. I think.

Super dorky talent to bust out only with shakespeare nerds - if you read me any line out of 12th Night, I can tell you who is saying it to whom and why. Can almost always pull this off with King Lear too.

Living within my means.

I suck at: being efficient, keeping my mouth shut, ending relationships. It usually takes about three years.

I don't know when to keep my mouth shut. The upshot of this is that you can pretty much count on me being totally honest about everything.

Food: gelato, greek salad, bean sprouts, blood-orange sorbet, rum raisin haagen-daz, tom kah gai, black raspberry ice cream from Bev's, plum wine on green-tea rice dream, a meal at Bizen Japanese Restaurant in GB, good cold borzst, tzatsiki and anything you dip in butter, especially lobster. Mango lassis. Oh, and girly-drinks, preferably with umbrella straws.

Books and Plays: King Lear, August: Osage County, Twelfth Night, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, The Mismeasure of Man (Stephen J Gould), The Mismeasure of Woman (Carol Tavris), Nickle and Dimed (Barbara Ehrenreich), Julius Caesar, Othello, Running with Scissors, Philip Lieberman's series of books on the evolution of language, Jack and Jill (Jane Martin), Oliver Sacks, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I have a fondness for Troilus & Cressida, R&J, Much Ado, Measure for Measure, Henry VI part 3 and Hamlet as well.

Movies: The Lion in Winter, Best In Show and Waiting for Guffman, Oliver Parker's Othello (with Laurence Fishburn and Kenneth Branagh), Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, Sense and Sensibility (Emma Thompson rules), Julie Taymor's Titus, Shaolin Soccer, Scotland PA, A Midwinter's Tale, Some Like It Hot, Cold Comfort Farm, Shakespeare in Love, Amadeus.
Just added: Slumdog Millionaire, Milk. They rocked.

TV, comedy and miniseries: Firefly, Eddie Izzard, I Claudius, The Daily Show, Rome (although I have more than one bone to pick), Red Dwarf. Enjoying Heroes and House via the internets lately.

Rachel Maddow is my favorite not-fake newsperson ever.

Radio and podcasts: NPR anytime I drive, cook, work out or fold the laundry. This American Life, Savage Love, Bill Maher.

Music:
Highly variable. Lately I find myself listening to The Decemberists, Erin Mckeown, The Kinks, The Killers, Meg Hutchinson, Vampire Weekend, Greg Laswell, Liz Phair, Jens Lekman, Spoon, The Magnetic Fields, The Pogues, Massive Attack, Rufus Wainwright, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Billy Bragg & Wilco, Blondie, Dandy Warhols, Greenday, Johnny Cash, Jose Gonzales, The Mountain Goats, Pulp, Rufus Wainwright,Neko Case, Okkervil River, The New Pornographers, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Pixies, Ludwig van Beethoven, Depeche Mode, Lily Allen, The Postal Service, Ingrid Michaelson, Nirvana, Jean-Guihen Queyras, The Shins, Donovan, and Leonard Cohen (the old stuff).

Good food, good friends, some venue of creative expression (acting, directing, sculpture, what have you), intellectual discussion, staying in motion. Intimacy of all forms.

What am I going to be when I grow up?

Food. I'd like to spend more of my time cooking, and occasionally make something inspired, but am generally undisciplined about actually doing so.

Shakespeare.

Politics.
Class.
The social construction of gender.

[August 2008] As of late, one very confusing situation and a hard woman to forget, and what the hell I think I'm doing . . .
[Oct 2008] update on that: ripping out my own heart.
[Nov 2008] further update:
For where thou art, there is the world itself
....And where thou art not, desolation.
I can no more: live thou to joy thy life;
Myself no joy in nought but that thou livest.
[Jan 2008] Update again: Okay, I've chilled out a bit now. Time to get back to what to do with my life.
[May 2009] Well, I guess it's teaching for now...
[Aug 2009] What now?
Oct 2009: Oh, this.

Falling asleep on a friend's couch after drinking too much sake and plum wine.
[Jan 2008 Update]: not so much lately. Was going out and meeting women for a while. But it's too friggin cold.
[April 2009]: Starting now, I plan to be checking out a new neighborhood of NYC.
[Oct 2009: Out or in with friends]

My first kiss was at age 17 1/2. It turned into a six year relationship, followed immediately by a seven year one. Yes, that means I spent all of ages 17 to 30 with the first to women I was with.

I've never "cheated" on anybody, even when maybe I should have.

I was born on an Ashram. Actually, that's not private at all.

The ever growing majority of women I have slept with in my life have self-identified as queer or "usually a lesbian." Nothing I aimed for, but just seems to keep happening.

you'd like to.

you don't mind if I'm not careful I start talking about Shakespeare characters like they're my personal friends.

That, and don't mind that I'll try to explain my ethical beliefs via tangents into the evolution of human specialization for behavioral flexibility, existentialism and proto-existential characters in Shakespearean tragedy. And I'll go on if allowed to about the political relevance of the nature-nature debate, neurological plasticity, and the sexual norms and political systems of the classical Greeks and Romans. But more often, what I won't shut up about is Shakespeare.