The short version:Is she yet another of those bi poly pagan queer geek girls living in Seattle? Probably not. Most decidedly not. Disappointingly not. No really, you'll be disappointed.

ok, actually she is.. but she's so much more!

I am...
Transplant from New England who writes pretentiously about herself. Lighting/set designer and stagehand, tried cooking school, ran off with the circus, started programming to pay the bills when the art didn't bring in the big moolah, worked for a little online bookstore you might have heard of, working towards creative/artistic independence and community. Currently splitting her time between game theory and video codecs and open-source CMS projects.

The looooooooong version:I'm terrible at self-promotion, but a genius at adding value. I wrote this L3 summary in response to a question someone asked me a year or more ago.. and since I'm lazy AND environmentally sensitive, I'm recylcing. :)

If I had the talent, the skill, the brevity of wit to sum myself up in 40 words, then many problems would be solved. Oh, not the big ones � hunger, world peace, why they put buttons on the left or the right side of a garment, depending upon whether its intended for a man or a woman.. no, I mean the little ones, the truly minor ones that we 21st century people spend so much time fretting over. Rent. Weather reports. Bad seats at the movies. Being cut off in traffic. If I could communicate with such liquid ease as would be required in forty staccato words full of meaning and feeling, then somehow I think I'd be able to communicate passion, desire, self-examination, and maybe a touch of hope into the world.

Since that doesn't seem to be my forte, instead does it stand to reason that perhaps the other extreme might work, a deluge of verbiage to disguise my own inability to say, �this is my feeling, this is my thought�? I'd hardly be alone in such company � many writers disguise their lack of true knowing or wisdom with a cavalcade of words, flexing the might of eclectic liberal arts degrees by using such words as �cavalcade�, distancing themselves from the recipient of their words in their own attempts to communicate, to reach forth and touch someone else's mind with their own, to open and to share such knowledge as moved them to put pen to paper, fingers to keys.

Of course, being verbose has its own pitfalls, as witnessed by observing anyone who's attempted Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chaucer, Les Mis, or War and Peace. See how delicately their eyelids flutter, as sleeps chases closer to them, disguised in words wrapped with the heavy authority of �Classic� stamped onto the cover. Listen as the breathing grows heavy and regular, a somnolent rhythm of life slumbering through dreams of small, frightened French peasants fighting for their independence from Marie Antoinette and her legions of Roman soldiers while.. gah! Wake up! The text has slipped from the reader's hands and fallen heavily to the floor, the place is lost, and the reader, returning to the pages, finds herself unable to remember where she left off.

Worse yet, extensive words may cloud the issue, and raise up such a miasma of obfuscation within the reader the communication has not occurred at all.. so a balance between prompt explanation and extensive exploration must be found, ere the end.

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Being treated as an individual is a problem for most people; we claim we want that, yet we also yearn in many ways to belong to something outside ourselves. We need the familiar to define for us what we are, and perhaps more importantly, what we are not. We cling to prejudice, to bitterness, to anger and hate and love and friendship and family longs past the point of desire through this need to understand ourselves by understanding the Other. As I struggle to define myself as a person, to find the hidden soul that Sartre might claim fails to exist outside of my own actions, I can reject neither the desire to be myself nor the baggage of self-expectations, of social climates and interpretations, as it is these sorts of subtle interactions according to societal expectations that allow others to begin to understand the matrix of myriad selves we thrust forth to the world� and so I quote Sartre in an effort to impress, to signify my educations, my intelligences, perhaps even to admit to a touch of pretense at my own expense, acknowledged with a rueful smile.

So then, to answer more directly, and with far less flighty terms and hopefully less philisophical window-dressings, I am sometimes someone who is articulate, well-thought of by herself and her peers, who has received perhaps a few too many �crotch-shot profiles� from Horny Net Geeks, looking all to... well, for a variety of things, activities, or ends, few of them having examined what exactly it is they want, unable to express it beyond a �U R hot! Like my cock? Its nine inches and big as my wrist�..

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Creativity is what I wake up for every morning, and what far too often I fail to find in my daily life. I struggle to balance the demands of the American labor market with my desire as an artist. Artist.. what a funny word, at least.. to me. I seldom use it to describe myself, since artists only paint.. right? They don't build and paint furniture, they don't design lights for theatre, they don't try cooking school until it bores them, they don't bother with obsessing over a hobby for 6-12 months before moving on to the next in-depth obsession, and they certainly don't program computers as a means of paying the bills when their art doesn't sell� aren't artists supposed to be starving in garrets above coffee shops, and steal pastries, and teach english in Clichy at private schools, while written maddeningly passionate letters to their married lover in Paris?

I hate starving, I have too much stuff to live in a garret, I don't think theft is a viable long-term solution to many of life's problems (hunger included), and I don't have a married lover in Paris. I /have/ been to Clichy in the summertime, but I can't really say much to recommend it, as I was sick with a summer flu at the time, and was trying desperately to find a chemist who understood English, since between my cold, my high-school French, and the rather dreadful French-Canadian/Quebecois accent I picked up made communication difficult. (Funny thing is, that Quebecois accent tinges every non-English language I've learned. Even my sign-language as a hint of nasally French..)

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To return to the theme of brevity, I'm often asked to sum myself up in a few words, and I can't do it. Oh, I don't have some sort of self-inflated opinion of myself; I quite simply don't think that a small amount of words, self-originating at that, can encompass the fullness of a person. I'm adventurous but cautious, engaged but detached, intrigued but jaded, excited but lazy. If only I could construct some N dimensional graphing system, with a variety of lines and bell curves, colored swoops that would delineate my personality. Still, an attempt should be made.

I'm afraid of dancing, and have been since a rather tragic episode involving Up With People when I was 7, being told in front of an audience of hundreds that I danced like a girl. �No poo,� I thought at the time (my 7 year old brain unable to think of anything more shocking to say that �poo�) �I /am/ a girl.� Since then, its been an interesting life. ^_^ I love movies and music, but try desperately not to connect to people through them; hopefully I moved beyond the stage where I had to make a mix-tape to express my feelings long ago. Today when I make a mix-tape to express myself, its because I /choose/ to do so. ^_^

I use �anime emoticons� far too often, because that's actually how I smile. I scrunch my eyes shut. Its genetics; there's a picture of my brother and I with 8 of our cousins (I come from a HUGE extended family..) and someone had obviously said something funny instead of �say cheese!� because we're all there with our eyes squashed shut, grinning like fools.

I'm doing something with my life that you're either scared off or disgustd by.. but its my life, and disapproval by anonymous strangers is hardly an effective deterant.

I'm secretly a jock at heart. A few years ago, it started with hockey, one exhousemate dragging me to games in Everett and then another coming over to watch Stanley Cup matches on my TV. I played lacrosse in high school, mostly as a way to appease my parents, who insisted I have a sport besides working backstage at area theatres, and since the school wouldn't let me play field hockey, lacrose was a handy compromise. Being a lacrosse goalie was easy, since I didn't actually have to do much besides have maniacs with sticks run at me and hurl small, hard balls at my body. I thought for a long time that I could parlay this into a career (the having things thrown at me, not the athleticism..)

In that past few years I've become a bit of a soccer fan, going to see the Seattle Sounders (men's and women's teams) before they were the cool thing in town. I also follow Newcastle United in the EPL. I'm one of the crazy people who bang on drums and sing songs and chants to my favorite players. This surprises me, as I'm usually the person most in touch with what 'proper' etiquette for a given situation is. I'm still trying to figure out exactly at what point the 'soccer fever' began. I'd like to be able to blame something or SOMEONE, although I doubt a lawsuit is really viable.

I love the meditation of driving between outposts of civilization at night, conversations at 4:30am, and getting lost (and then, usually, getting found.) I like to hike and camp, but only where there's no spiders, since I'm direly afraid of them. I understand their function in the ecosystem, I know they won't get me in the night, I know that its silly.. but everyone needs some sort of irrational fear, if only so that when they make my life into a movie, the actor playing me will have something interesting and 'human' to hook into to portray my vulnerable side.

I don't expect a movie to ever be made of my life, so I've never considered exactly who would play me. I expect that so many details of my life would have to be changed anyway, a car chase or two added, and a shower scene, all in an effort to grab at the vital under-25 male market, that it would matter little who they chose.

In seriousness though, I used to think that I'd lived a boring life, one devoid of anything more interesting than the occasional snowstorm or near-death experience at the age of 8 that I thought EVERYONE had, until I got to The Big City of Seattle 5 years ago and settled into dot-com routines, a programmer for a little online bookstore; has it been an actually boring life? Not really, and thankfully, the 'universe' has provided. Things just happen, things just... work out, in the end, generally for the best. I'd not be who I am, a person who I'm rather happy at being most days, if my life hadn't charted the odd course it has. Of course I'm pleased with what's happened. ^_^

I'm constantly and consistently disappointed with people who define themselves by only a single aspect of their personality. There's so many things to be interested in, reasons to wake up in the morning. I paint furniture, program computers, collect stuffed vegetables, hike, cook, garden, breath deeply, sew, sing (badly, perhaps, but still, I /do/), write, fix small mechanical devices, wax poetic, wane sadness, and talk back at movies. It perplexes me when people assume that I'll automatically like, accept, or want to associate with them on the basis of a single shared interest or issue.

I've never had anyone tell me what they notice first about me. I doubt, somehow, that its my fine bone marrow. Probably my golden blonde hair; but mostly, I think, they're trying to figure out if they've met me before.

Editors

• clamoring

For a long time, I refused to answer this question on the grounds that its pointless, since I have a capacity for enjoying almost every experience.

No, really. I keep a blog all about it.

Books:
I've been reading a lot of sciFi the past few months.. every year I read all the Hugo nominees, and I found a couple new authors who I enjoyed enough to persue the rest of their books. I tend to read a lot of semi-scientific pop books that are really 200 page versions of essays that first appeared in Harpers. I am a sucker for Whitman, the Transcendentalists, and the Proust-Lawrence-Nin continuum.

Movies:
The only films I find I can't stand are the cheese spinoffs of successful comedy sketches.. and even then, if I'm bored, can't sleep, or TiVo is insistent, I may end up watching Hollywood Ninja.. again.

Oh, and horror films. *shudder* They really, really scare me.

Music:
Here's what iTunes thinks are my favorites.

Food:
I love organics, veggies, every cuisine I've tried has won my heart and pallete... except for Korean. For some reason, it just doesn't agree with me.... and yet, its on my list of things to try again. For years I didn't eat fish or seafood, but constantly tried it, until one day I discovered that I actually /could/ enjoy it.

Sort of sums up my life. Always touching the hot plate to make sure its still painful. Adventerous, that the charitable way of saying it.

So I love teh veggies and teh farmer's market foods... but I also love Fair Food - things deep fried on sticks. I love dropping a C-note on an insanely good steak dinner with a friend. Its the EXPERIENCE of the food that I enjoy, not just the substance of it as a distinct thing.

I think I'd learn to do without, somehow. Sometimes I think that I should aspire to live without, for the practice.

How to improve both my own life and the lives of those I choose to spend my time with.

Sitting in a poker room losing money. Watching my puppy terrorize unseen enemies. Hiking in the dark to a campsite someone told me would afford a view of an unspeakably beautiful sunrise. Eating sushi-on-a-train with friends. Cursing the code that Just Won't Work.

..that my darkest secrets are not as dark or scary as I once thought. :)

You just should if you like be disappointed.