Grew up in on the west coast, went to college on the east coast, spent two years goofing off including a stint in Austin, and now I work in DC. When I'm not at work I like to write, read, play sports, play games, or think about how I can find more time for those things.

I went to a small liberal arts college not too far from D.C. and spent four years learning the noble arts of sophistry and pretension from the great old dead white guys of western civilization. To put it in terms that the college would prefer: I underwent a classical education focusing on exposure to primary source materials with small discussion-based classes. They swear that if I took the same courses at a more typical school that offered majors, I'd have a double major in 1) History of Math and Science and 2) Philosophy with a double minor in 1m) Classics and 2m) Comparative Literature. Needless to say, I was very employable coming out of college.

Before college I lived in Oregon, near Eugene. I was born in Houston, Texas and I am glad that my family moved away from there while I was young. Texas has some things going for it, but Oregon is much more to my tastes. I'm not a hippy by the standards out there, but I still cringe when I see how much less people recycle on the east coast. I miss not having a sales tax even though I have gotten used to it now. People ask me whether I want to go back, but (he reveals how uncool he is) I take pride in coming from a small town and leaving it behind. Too many of the people I knew growing up stayed and Facebook gives me reminders every day why I am happier out here.

Trying to turn "A little extra" into "Fit". I bought an annual Capital Bikeshare membership approximately three days before the LivingSocial deal came out last year... then I bought the deal too. So I'm in year two now and glad I made the purchases. I don't really care for running as a form of exercise: it takes forever and if I'm going to run I want to do it for a reason. So I try to encourage my lazy coworkers to play basketball, but they all have lame excuses like "I love my spouse/children and want to spend my free time with them."

I joined Goodreads because I was tired of never being able to remember what books I have read or want to read or what I think of them. That's been good for me and it's helped me knock out a few books that may have gone forever unread otherwise.

Dodging questions that might result in me saying something good about myself. Oh, figs, I'm not supposed to do that though... I don't like to brag or seem as if I am, so to start, I am good at being humble(?). I'm good at taking tests, which makes me a little sad because I'm unlikely to take many more at this point in my life. I enjoy thinking about how to solve problems, real or hypothetical. I'm told that I'm a decent conversationalist, which is good because I would only believe that was so if someone else told me. I know a little about wine thanks to those two years of goofing off which included working at wine stores and wine bars, so I can talk a little of the lingo of notes and bouquets and lingerings on the palate.

I have the makings of a stereotypical Viking: tall, blond, and bearded.

Books: Middlemarch, Dune, Lolita, Women, Lord of Light (to end my one word title streak), Guns Germs and Steel, Shock Doctrine, The Omnivore's Dilemma, White Noise, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, A Song of Ice and Fire, gobs more

Movies: Star Wars (original trilogy, the prequels are a disgrace), Raising Arizona, Mary Poppins, Heat, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Primer, the "Dollars" trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West

Music: The Mountain Goats, The Magnetic Fields, Isis, Tool, Pelican, Electric Wizard, The Dead Kennedys, Tom Waits, Rachmaninov, The Arcade Fire

Food: there are a lot of ways to talk about food... reading The Omnivore's Dilemma had me converted to vegetarianism of a sort for a time. My zeal for that faded over time as I tried low-carb for awhile and didn't find that it meshed well with vegetarian. I got tired of not being able to drink beer so I gave up on that and have reverted to a more typical diet. So these days I just try to buy meat only from farmer's markets and generally eat meat less often. I discovered kale back a few months ago, so I eat a lot of that. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, but I think that's mostly because I love eggs and they don't appear in other meals. Sriracha gets put on everything.

Snatches of songs that flit through my head
Things to read
Games
Ways to move from one place to another that aren't a car
The sword of Damocles (life is short)
Parentheses (I love to use them all the time; I have to try really hard to keep them out of every sentence I write)

Why so many profiles have the word 'taco' in them, natural selection, history, lyrics, musical phrases, engineering schools, social engineering, books I want to read, economic theory, "the novel", agriculture, cause and effect, saving the species, politics, being left-handed, spelling, accuracy, how many things I need to learn before I can finally discover the omni-science that will cure all of humanity's ills (I have read WAY too much science fiction), old jokes or turns of phrase that randomly come to me and cause me to embarrass myself laughing aloud at seemingly nothing (and I think about these things in just about as organized a fashion as I present them here)

Drinking at a bar that isn't on H Street and wishing I was at a bar on H Street. Getting hungrier than I can stand and wishing that bars would have more food specials. Bar owners: I'm going to drink on Friday - that's a given - so how about some discounted food to keep me going (and drinking more)?

I have very little idea of what exactly I am going to do with myself in the longer-term and that doesn't bother me as much as it probably should.

You're well read, read well, and write well. You can recite poetry from memory. You like bourbon. You are left-handed. You are or were a goon.