I'm a junior in college, working towards a master's in music education, minoring in creative writing. I've come to terms with my future on a street corner. I like talking about topics that get people all riled up and contentious. Despite this, I have the sensibility of a man from the 1800s. A refined man, not a drunken, boorish shell of one.

Music is the larger part of how I spend my time. I play sax, mostly alto and tenor, and I have a great time doing it. I cannot play the guitar, and I am trying to play the piano. I used to sing in a rock and roll band, but that ended. I generally don't sing anymore, but for the record, it sounds like a mix between the guy from Eels and Tom Waits.

I practiced taekwondo for about nine years, but stopped because over time I developed back problems from it. In the process of finding physical therapy, I was made to believe for a short while that I had a tumor on my spine. I'm not fond of doctors. Now my back is better and I box from time to time.

I'm generally a very calm person. It takes a great deal to get to me. I still have opinions and things I get to be a bitchy flibbertigibbet over, but mostly I just choose not to waste time being angry.

My thoughts, and by extension my writing and how I talk, are very stream of consciousness, sometimes to an annoying extent. If you've read American Psycho, and you noticed how the sentences could go on for ages and make three or four different points all at once, you know what I'm talking about.

I'm more spiritual than religious, but even that is a stretch. I enjoy and respect nature, and I generally don't kill animals though I make an exception for mosquitoes and flies. I will eat them, though. Animals, not mosquitoes and flies. I also make an effort to treat everyone with respect, with resounding success. Sometimes my sense of humor clashes with this. I am ragingly sarcastic, and this is periodically confused with being an asshole. So take note: I am not an asshole. Just unapologetically sarcastic.

I have only a couple things that bother me. Pet peeves. The biggest one of these is when I'm talking to someone and their cell phone rings and they answer it and have a conversation. A minute is fine; that is how much slack I give. Any longer than that and I got annoyed, and I have a cut-off point. You know what happens when you stay on the phone too long around me? I leave. I get up off of whatever I was sitting on and I walk back to my dorm and I do something more productive than listening to you talk to someone who's not me.

My other pet peeve is assholes.

I am studying saxophone performance and music education. That is "classical" music, not popular music or anything marketable. My dream for a while was getting a job playing for a symphony or orchestra. As it turns out, the saxophone is rarely used. So now my plan is to give lessons and teach high school or college students. Eventually I will sell out and write jingles for car commercials. I am convinced I can make enough money this way to support a habit of doing lines of blow off of hookers' tits. Same end result as doing popular music, different method of transportation.

I am also minoring in poetry writing. Because that is where the big bucks are.

I like learning for the sake of knowing more stuff. If I think of something that interests me, I read books about it. I never learn enough for any of it to be applicable in real life. Things like psychology, forensics and interesting math things. I recently read a book on quantum mechanics. It blew my mind. Sometimes I try learning foreign languages. I would not mind knowing French or Italian.

being fascinated by things. It's easy for me to get distracted looking at something or listening to something because of this, but I think of it as a positive thing. Even when it means looking at a steaming sewer vent for half an hour and not getting bored. Have you ever watched a steaming sewer vent? It's wonderful.

I also like to think that I'm really good at saxophone, but I know I'm not nearly good enough yet. I try to have at least a decent level of competency in everything I do. Sometimes I harmonize chorales. Don't judge.

I'm also really good at have multi-sided, hypothetical conversations with myself around other people. The ones where you and some other people are talking about a hypothetical person, say, a senile bus driver and you talk about what they do when they go home after work. And then one of the people in your group goes entirely too far and imagines the bus driver a wife and kids and their arguments at the dinner table and then he gets up and smacks the wife and the kid cries and the dad yells and then goes to a bar with the guys and drinks and takes a lady back to a motel and gets an STD from her and spreads it to his wife and they yell about it and have a messy divorce and go to trial for custody rights of the kids. The person who imagines all of those things, verbally, out loud, with dialogue? That's me.

Having never had anyone approach me and say, "When I first saw you, I noticed your eyes," I cannot answer this question.

But I guess it's possible for someone to say that, but I can't imagine how I'd react. "Um." "You know what, nevermind." And they storm off angrily as I say "Please come back you have also nice eyes." Then I spend the rest of the day wondering how the conversation could have played out differently and imagine if they've approached someone else and said what they noticed first about them. And if they start a relationship that lasts and start a family and what if one day if I'm a musician she is at one of the concerts and she recognizes me and we have a cup of coffee afterwards and we remember when she first said "When I first saw you, I noticed your eyes." And we would get along great and then the conversation would die down and we would realize that no matter how well we got along, nothing could ever come of it.

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm really good at.

I am a large fan of Kurt Vonnegut. Not physically large, but large in terms of my fandom. Except for Galapagos, which was just not a good book. I also used to like whatever Chuck Palahniuk wrote, but then I read Pygmy and gave up. Some of what he's written is good. Also, e. e. cummings poems, American Psycho, The Lorax, Catch-22 and things of that nature. I also read Candide and enjoyed it. Plays are good too, such as Death of a Salesman or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

No new movies come out these days, a fact that I frequently lament to anybody around. It is unfortunate that setting the bar lower seems to excuse movies from their general awfulness. Movies I do like, however, include pretty much anything with Kevin Spacey in it. The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Fargo, Leon, Memento. Also comedies. My taste in comedy is either mature or completely juvenile.

I like most music that is not country or pop, because pop offends my sensibilities. It is what happens when you study music. Also like lots of older jazz. Not Kenny G, he writes elevator music. I'm talking about Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, all the bebop saxophones, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Miles Davis before he went and lost his damn mind.
Bands I like: Eels, Nine Inch Nails, Meatloaf, Radiohead, Dillinger Escape Plan, NWA, Public Enemy, Dream Theater, Tom Waits, Mountain Goats, Queens of the Stone Age, Lil Wayne, TI, John Zorn, The Bug, Cake. Also, I'm into classical music, but more especially the kind that doesn't sound like Bach. Pettersson, Liszt, Brahms, Glass and Cage.

I like a lot of food, as long as it doesn't have much of the following: tomatoes, that dark green lettuce that tastes bitter, cold cuts that are still wet. I don't eat seafood. There's some other things, but it gets pretty draining to think of them.

I don't watch shows on TV. I watch them several days later when I find someone who recorded it or online. Sopranos, Dexter, Lost, The Office, Meet the Press.

I have technology junkie tendencies. Some things make my life much easier and, in general, better. My iPod and computer. Both of which have no fingerprints on them, anywhere. My book of e. e. cummings, which is actually the school library's copy that I just renew as many times as possible, then return and check out the very next day and start the process all over again. My saxophones. I know that one involves multiple things. I'm disregarding that. Also, the company of people and a dog. Notice how I talk in an abstraction to fit multiple things into one. Loophole.

And my senses. I need those. Again with the abstractions, you say? Stop it, you say? No.

things as I go about other things. Do I really succeed in communicating myself with people as well as I would like, while I wake up in the morning. Is this what I want with my life, while I eat lunch. One of many girls I will never go up and say hello to, while I do my laundry. As people fall in and out of my life has all that much really changed, while I make flash cards.

So I suppose I think about the same things as every other person.

is that people think I'm licked. They all think I'm licked. Well, I'm not licked.

really, you should just message me if anything you read interests you. Even if it didn't, there's still no reason not to message me. I really enjoy the process of getting to know people. I will always take a new friend, whether or not you live anywhere near me at all.