I’M MOVING TO LAWRENCE, KS THIS SUMMER FOR COLLEGE.

*ahem* Sorry for the All Caps; won’t happen again. I thought it was important to mention, though.

So, yes, I’ve recently been accepted into the PhD Program for Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. My enrollment starts this Fall, and I want to move to Lawrence either in July or early August. I’m deliriously happy about this, for multiple reasons.

As you could probably guess from that, I’m a booknerd. I love reading and writing. Pretty much everything I do personally and professionally stems from this. I want to be a full-time writer and professor of English someday; I’m lucky to have been published a few times, and I hope to have further success in that regard soon. I also enjoy editing and publishing fiction and nonfiction. I mainly work in this regard as a managing editor for an online literary magazine and as a copy/line editor for a small press. I’ve been teaching part-time at the local junior college for the past four years, but once I move to Lawrence I’ll be teaching classes as a GTA at KU, which I’m really excited about.

I’m excited about going to Kansas because it’s another new place for me. I’ve travelled all over the US in the past few years – Florida, the Rockies, Maine, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts – and even gone to Canada. I’ve lived in Missouri my whole life, and in all honesty I’ve gotten sick of it, so I’m looking forward to a change in scenery.

Of course, this is a dating site, and I would love to meet some wonderful women. I want to meet new people in general and make new friends, especially since I’m moving soon. I don’t want to force things just for the sake of being in a relationship, but it would be awesome to find a mutual attraction with someone and see what develops. Of course, I especially want to meet people in the Lawrence, KS area.

There’s more to be than the booknerd thing, of course. Other useful tidbits:

*I am awesome with animals and kids
*Big supporter of the arts in general: theater, music, art galleries, museums, etc.
*I love nature and hiking.
*I used to be massively overweight. Since 2008, I’ve lost almost 140 pounds. This is easily my proudest achievement from the past few years.
*I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Guinness.

See above: teaching, writing, editing, publishing. Also, reclaiming my social life, especially with the upcoming change of locale. Thankfully, I love my work, because it’s all tied into my personal passions, and I’ve made some great friends and opportunities because of it. I also keep a blog (who the hell doesn’t?), which gives me the chance to exercise my essayist muscles, though I’d love to work up to the point where I regularly contribute to various magazines or websites.

* Listening. I'm always interested in character and human behavior. Besides, most people have a good story to tell, whether they realize it or not.
* Explaining why comma splices are bad.
* Writing (I hope).
* In all seriousness, I am really good at reading and retaining information for long periods of time, which comes in really handy in grad school.

I recently participated in a friend's wedding as a groomsman. A woman at the wedding (a touch drunk, by her own admission) was kind enough to point out my best features to me: my eyes, my lips, and my smile. Up to that point, I'd never known what people actually noticed about me at first glance, mostly because I'd never asked.

BOOKS

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
The short stories of Ray Bradbury
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery ( read it at least twice a year)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Bone by Jeff Smith
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
The Wizard of Earthsea Cycle by Ursula Le Guin
The short fiction of Franz Kafka (haven’t read his novels yet)
Much of Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories
Much of Harlan Ellison’s fiction
Anything by William Blake
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
The short fiction of Julio Cortazar
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The short fiction of Donald Barthelme
Almost anything by Grant Morrison (Batman RIP kinda disappointed me)
The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Anything by Osamu Tezuka (I love his Phoenix and Buddha comics series, but he’s got a lot of great standalone work too, which hardly anyone knows about)
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene
Flatland by Edwin Abbott
Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

MUSIC

Radiohead, M83, Bat For Lashes, Passion Pit, The Chemical Brothers, Kate Bush, My Bloody Valentine, Foals, Crystal Castles, The National, Niki and the Dove, TV On the Radio, The Weeknd, Wild Beasts, Neon Indian, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, School of Seven Bells, Bjork, Scott Walker, The Smashing Pumpkins, Tindersticks, Washed Out, Beach House, Hot Chip, Interpol, Silversun Pickups, Sigur Ros, The Joy Formidable, Daft Punk, The Invisible, Tame Impala, Queens of the Stone Age, Liars, Elbow, Placebo, Florence + the Machine, Muse, PJ Harvey, The Naked and Famous, Wild Nothing, Esben and the Witch, The Horrors, The Mars Volta, The Big Pink, The Black Keys

MOVIES

The Fall, The Dark Knight, Network, Memento, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Inception, Looper, Alien, Anything by Hayao Miyazaki, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Once Upon a time in the West, The Man With No Name Trilogy (Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood et al.), Akira, Anything by Pixar (except Cars – it’s okay, but not great), The Dark Crystal, Moon, Timecrimes, Session 9, The Neverending Story, Big Fish, The Truman Show, Dead Alive, Evil Dead, Videodrome, Lake Mungo, Kill List, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, Mulholland Dr., Children of Men, RoboCop, Pan’s Labyrinth, Delicatessen, Amadeus, Enter the Dragon, The Raid: Redemption, Blade Runner, Oldboy, I Saw the Devil, The Social Network, Shaun of the Dead, Escape From New York, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Labyrinth (with David Bowie!)

SHOWS

Monty Python's Flying Circus, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Archer, Adventure Time, Regular Show, The League of Gentlemen, Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, The Venture Bros., Ren and Stimpy Show, Rocko’s Modern Life, The Tick, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Futurama, South Park, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Prisoner (the 60s version), Paranoia Agent, FLCL, Tales from the Crypt (childhood favorite)

1. My family
2. My brain
3. A really good book
4. A computer
5. A pen
6. A notebook

Oh, I'm all over the place on that: writing, ideas for stories, grading, the guy in the Wal Mart parking lot with the swastikas painted on his truck (true story), superpowers, quantum physics, parallel universes, evolution, the nature and transference of stupidity, the mystery of how Bush got eight years out of us, and last but not least escape.

Working, sadly.

It wouldn't be much fun getting to know me if I spilled my guts right now, would it?

You share my interests and think you'd like to get to know me. I'm pretty open, or I try to be anyway.