I'm a geek who feels uncomfortable among geeks, and an occasional activist who feels like an outsider among other outsiders. I talk too loud, I care too much, and I wear too-bright colors. I don't fit in, but when I find people who I fit in with, I hang on to them, hard. Often, those are people who may be in their thirties, like me, but are still getting into the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll side of life. I don't get along as well with people who got their fill of youthful nonsense in their teens and are now buying houses.

I push buttons on a computer for a living. It's swung from a calling to a passion to a vocation for me. Maybe it'll swing back someday. It's okay if it doesn't.

I grew up in Boston, then in the suburbs thereof, and I've been running from the suburbs ever since. I moved to Berkeley for grad school and for a relationship. The relationship was abusive and so was grad school, and I escaped both but stayed on the West Coast. Last winter I lived in a yurt in a clothing-optional community in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In retrospect, the winter wasn't the best time to do that. As of March 2013, I'm in Vancouver, BC for a temporary training assignment. At the end of May I'll have to go back to the less civilized country I'm a citizen of.

I'm crazy, not in the sense of being zany or risk-seeking but in the sense of having a variety of conditions that affect my mental health. Some go by the names "depression" and "anxiety", but also are the consequences of growing up in a dysfunctional environment (locally) and continuing to be in one (globally). I take meds and get therapy so that I can appear sane, but I still don't like to hear "crazy" get used as a pejorative, for the same reason I don't like to hear someone aver that a sweater is "so gay". I've had to fight to be able to do things like get out of bed in the morning and hold down a job. Sometimes I feel like the thing that sets me apart the most from other people is never having had the experience of being a kid who had adults in my life who I could trust. When I meet someone who really gets that *and* who uses too many big words and alienates people, that'll be great.

I'm fat, not "overweight", but OkCupid doesn't have that as an option. I'm not looking to change that, and it doesn't have much to do with whether or not I can do any particular physical activity. The war on obesity frustrates me because any attempt to eliminate a specific type of person from the world frustrates me, and also because I'm one of the people being targeted for elimination. Health at Every Size (HAES, for searchability) is a cool idea.

I'll accept the risk of missing my train so that I might have the pleasure of running and just barely catching it, rather than leaving early enough to guarantee I'll be on time. Managing myself and my use of resources, particularly time, is an endless struggle for me. I've found that making to-do lists and schedules for myself, and generating the occasional random number to decide which thing to do next, makes me happier.

"Poly" and "kinky" are both examples of labels that might or might not say more about me than they obscure about me. I'm not sure. Like Billy Bragg, I can feed and dress and wash myself and sleep without the light on; but I also don't want to be more invested in someone else than they are in me.

Curiosity might be my only strong and abiding personality trait. No matter how depressed I've been, I've never stopped wanting to know and wanting to learn. That curiosity extends to other people's lives as well. The words "I don't want to know" are meaningless to me; I've never uttered them sincerely. The only reasons why I would refrain from telling someone else something about me would be either that they had power over me, or that I didn't want to make them uncomfortable. And I would only ever refrain from trying to find out something about someone else out of respect for them; nothing is TMI for me, in either direction.

I really like sensitive guys who say "fuck" a lot.

My job title has 'Research' in it, which means that almost every day I do stuff I don't know how to do. That gets stressful, but I guess the alternative is to only do stuff I know how to do, which would bore me.

I probably identify myself with my job too much. At times I feel like doing programming languages research is a little like being a writer and having other people write fanfiction about your characters.

I'm a two-time Ph.D dropout, flunk-out, or had-too-many-opinions-about-sexual-harassment-out, depending how you look at it. Grad school: don't do it.

I used to do functional programming and some automated theorem proving and I enjoyed those things when I was doing them, but I don't look back. I work full-time, and work isn't my hobby.

I think that ameliorating social inequality is the most important thing I can do with my life, and I'm struggling with figuring out to what extent I'm already doing that and to what extent I should be doing it more.

I'm also struggling with paying back a ton of debt; because I have a transsexual body, the health care system of the country of which I'm a system doesn't treat me as a human being. So I feel stuck in the middle: I can't really expect lower-class and working-class people to sympathize with me, whereas my relationship with money isn't anything like that of most of my fellow overpaid software engineers, either. Things could be worse, but I feel like it's a lonely place to be.

I really like board games and haven't been playing enough of them lately. I like lighthearted social games like Taboo, Pictionary, Apples to Apples, and some more obscure ones in the same overall genre, rather than games with novel-length instruction books. Ticket to Ride and Dominion -- and maybe even Settlers of Cataan and Power Grid if I'm in the mood for it -- are about my complexity limit. I don't have any interest in RPGs or LARPing.

I'm learning French from my computer, though I'm not using it for much right now.

Reading documentation, mental static analysis, debugging, sightreading, manipulating symbols with formal rules. I like to think I'm good at commenting on other people's talks and papers.

Getting around with only a bicycle and public transit, although I own a car now. Riding my bike slowly for long distances. Being alone. Writing awkward introductory emails on OkCupid.

My red glasses. Or that I'm wearing a hot pink shirt or something else that people coded as male aren't supposed to wear.

The concept of "favorites" makes me nervous (how can I be sure I've considered all the possibilities before picking a favorite?!), so I'll tell you the last ten books I read (as of September 2012) that I really enjoyed:

1. The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Patricia J. Williams)
2. A Different Mirror (Ronald Takaki)
3. Name Me Nobody (Lois-Ann Yamanaka)
4. Black Looks (bell hooks)
5. Two Nations (Andrew Hacker)
6. House of Holes (Nicholson Baker)
7. My Baby Rides the Short Bus (Yantra Bertelli (Editor), Jennifer Silverman (Editor), Sarah Talbot (Editor))
8. Big Sex, Little Death (Susie Bright)
9. Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (Oriana Small)
10. Lit: A Memoir (Mary Karr)

I read a lot of non-fiction because there's so much I need to know that I don't feel like I can spend a second reading fiction instead, despite mostly having enjoyed fiction in the past.

Same for movies:

1. Christiane F.; 2. Blue Valentine; 3. Street Trash; 4. Romeos; 5. We Were Here; 6. Kicking & Screaming; 7. Passing Strangers (if you've seen this too, definitely message me); 8. Please Give; 9. Wall Street; 10. White Oleander.

Music: Country and rap, mostly. Not really, unless that annoys you, in which case really. At age 32, I recently discovered that The Mountain Goats' "This Year" is the best song, a fact of which I had somehow been ignorant up until then.

Food: I'll eat almost anything that's vegetarian, except for celery, which I don't consider food. Fake meat is awesome, even though I haven't deliberately eaten meat in 22 years and don't miss it. Fake meat is like queer sex: worthy for its own reasons, not because it's "imitating" something else.

Headphones, Google Calendar, my bicycle, tea, the possibility of an open road, people to tell me I'm wrong.

...getting my first tattoo, which I'm hoping to do soon but have been putting off. Maybe you have thoughts about that? (Yes, I know what design I want to get, and I might even tell you.)

...the thin line between pleasing yourself and pleasing somebody else.

...why you haven't messaged me yet.

Perhaps more seriously: privilege, oppression, abuse culture, power imbalances, systematic exclusion, structural violence, microaggressions, cisnormativity and other harmful normativities. I'm real fun at parties. Also, how to use more of myself to work towards justice. I think writing about justice and injustice shouldn't be dismissed as "just talking on the Internet", but I don't want to stop with just writing either.

Along those lines, some text borrowed from queershoulder (with permission) that applies to me as well: "Also, this should go without saying, but: I lose patience real quick with folks who don't think about privilege and oppression and how those systems affect our lives, esp. as it relates to classism, racism, ableism, misogyny, biphobia, transphobia, transmisogyny, fatphobia, and whorephobia. Do your homework & don't make me suffer any foolishness, kthx." As well, if you're the kind of person who enjoys "playing devil's advocate" without disclosing in advance that you're doing so, I don't want to know you.

More often than not, working -- both the office and the Internet are quiet on Friday nights.

Going out to a movie or for coffee or dancing or walking would be a reason not to work, though.

I spent about a decade waiting for other people to realize I wasn't a woman, and when they finally did, I started getting turned on by wearing skirts and heels. Maybe whatever other people expect of me, violating those expectations will always get me going; or maybe I'm just another guy who gets turned on by the wind blowing the right way.

If:

... you ever find yourself too radical to relate to your professional peers and too skeptical to relate to your political or spiritual peers.

...you ever find yourself too queer for straights and too square for queers.

...you live in or near Vancouver and you want to get together for a beer/coffee/tea/ice cream/etc. I spend enough time in front of a screen as it is and I like to get to know people by talking in person, not exchanging lots of emails first.

...you want to go sing karaoke or hike or go on a bike ride and, like me, you want to make plans with other people to do these things so you'll actually do them.

If you want to message me but don't know what to say, why not say something about the last book you read? (Even if you didn't like it. Especially if.)

If I *don't* have to explain to you why Dan Savage is a horrible human being and why the Human Rights Campaign doesn't advance "LGBT" rights, that's a huge plus. Libertarians need not apply.