Who am I in reality? I don't know the answer to that question but it's certainly worth examining. I like existentialism because it's concerned primarily with the kind of navel gazing everyone should engage in - moderately.

I love being outdoors. Despite my NY affectations, I am still a product of the tree-lined freeways of Puget Sound. If you've never seen a mountain west of the Mississippi then you haven't seen a mountain. (Unless you've been to the Himalayas or something, in which case we should talk.)

If you like "Slacker" and the Mountain Goats, well, we might just have something there.

I'm working on a project of interviews. I talk to people for about half an hour and film it. It's mostly an exercise but maybe it'll turn into "art." In any event, I'm always looking for participants.

I read and I write. I'm going to journalism school in the fall. Ask me about it why don't you?

I try to push the limits of how "intense" one can be without being "intimidating."

Falling apart without going to pieces. Graduate school soon.

CRITICAL UPDATE (Jan 2013): I just got a tattoo of Opus the penguin from Bloom County. Please ask me about it.

Speaking and relating to Chinese or other sinophones. Writing premature memoirs. Putting my foot in my mouth - or having someone put it there for me.

I love to take pictures. Photography is awesome because it takes things I like - composition, light, expression - and doesn't demand too much in the way of hand/eye coordination or color perception.

I can talk a dog off a meat truck.

That I'm either under- or overdressed for any occasion.

In no order:

PRINTED MATTER
Deborah Eisenberg; Zadie Smith; Nabokov; Joan Didion; Kojève on Hegel; Nickel and Dimed; Angela Davis; An Unquiet Mind; Flannery O'Connor; Baudelaire; T.C. Boyle; Wallace; Miranda July; Lorrie Moore; James Baldwin; Thoughts Without a Thinker; Where'd You Go, Bernadette?; Cloud Atlas

VISUALS
Arbus; Sherman; Avedon; Nan Goldin; Steven Heller; Edward Tufte; Cartier-Bresson

MUSIC
The Kinks; Wu-Tang; Patti Smith; Pixies; Nina Simone; Pavement; Neil Young; The Flaming Lips; Silver Jews; Fiona Apple; Mountain Goats

FILM-TV
«Des Chiffres et des lettres»; Woody Allen; Terrence Malick; Wong Kar-wai; Robert Altman; Fargo; Bergman; The Larry Sanders Show; The Wire; Twin Peaks; Slacker; Enlightened

trees (damn hippies)
natural light (out of the cave)
camera
dr bronner's (eucalyptus but I've been experimenting w/ lavender since the bodega ran out)
books
bicycle
Pilot Precise V5 rollerball, black.

Things I could very easily live without:

Broadway below canal
People who try to take pictures with one hand or while walking (see above)
Ayn Rand
Congress
Synthetic fibers
Professional sports

Epistemology.

Is this the way the world ends? I think about politics a lot. Sometimes I feel like the whole world has gone crazy. Then I remember that a) I'm not alone in feeling this and b) there are more profound realizations I could be having.

Is there such a thing as social/economic justice and, if so, is it not our duty to pursue it?

The global south.

How someone can be a 92% match but a
55% friend.

Taking back the night. Drinking.

In third grade we had to run little proto-capitalist booths. Mine was a psychiatric clinic. I had to admit three patients and did not accept insurance.

It's going fine. I welcome all unique questions. I will respond to dumb, ungrammatical messages (the only kind anyone tends to send me initially) in Chinese.

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching search-lights.” 
— Edith Wharton

Say goodbye and good riddance to phatic expressions.