Edit: I keep moving around and confusing people so I'll just explain up here: I'm in an undisclosed African location for the next two months and will hopefully be home (to Boston) by early or mid-October.

The below profile was written while I lived in Indonesia (I was there for 2 years), and I haven't rewritten it yet because I haven't found the time/motivation. In that vein, sometimes I use this site a lot, and sometimes I don't log on for weeks, so don't be offended if I take a long time to reply to you.

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I graduated not so long ago, and miss Boston a lot, until I remind myself via my handy Boston weather widget that it's below freezing there, and I, on the other hand, live in the tropics. I find it amusing when my relatives ask me how the winters are here, and I get to remind them that I live on the equator. The unsure pause until they get why it was a funny question never gets old.

I'm here to work as a development economist, meaning that I'm at once a bit of a tech geek (I spend a lot of time at the computer, programming), a math geek, and a softie - I'm spending my life working on poverty issues.

I love what I do.

I spend lots of time thinking about political and economic issues, domestic and international.

My intellectual fixations and personality and occasionally a passing wind have taken me to several corners of the globe. My biggest hobby can just be classified as "exploration" - walking around new places, exploring and trying to understand every corner of where I am. I'm quite independent and able to love living alone in a foreign country for an extended period of time. I suppose this must mean I'm somewhat strange, because it requires a tolerance for discombobulation and loneliness and food poisoning and being the center of everyone's attention when walking down the street...

It's so important to who I am I wrote it all in the summary, but I just wanted to add that I actually did graduate from university. To the right under education I just had to put I graduated from space camp because, well, it's actually true.

Getting organizations to give me money so I can live in cool foreign countries.

Killing mosquitos. Yet there always seem to be more.

I'm tall (5'10.5''/179cm), but am nonetheless in heels.

A non-exhaustive list:

Books: White Teeth (Zadie Smith) - gets London pitch-perfect. The Magus (John Fowles) - mystical and erotic. The Worldly Philosophers (a history of economic thought). Nights at the Circus (Angela Carter). Watership Down was my faaavorite childhood book and I still have a very soft spot in my heart for it. I've been reading lots of Murakami lately and am still working out how I feel about it.

Since graduating I've been able to read much much more - kind of like being 14 again. It's awesome.

Movies: American Beauty. Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others. No Night is Too Long (obscure queer film with ridiculously hot sex scenes and a main character that I can empathize with too well for my own comfort). Brokeback Mountain. The Battle of Algiers. Fire, and Water (Deepa Mehta). Children of Men (oh, if only I couldn't too easily imagine a Britain like that!). Darjeeling Limited. If I had to pick one favorite, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would probably win out. In short, I like biting political/social commentary, especially if it comes with a touch of eroticism.

My motorcycle, and my huge back garden.

Cardamom.

Why it is that people do what they do, places look the way they look, countries are fucked up in the ways that they uniquely are.

I mean, not in a bad way. Here's an example:

Random expat: "Ugh, it's so dirty here. I hate how there's just trash in the streets."

Me: "Well, you know until not-so-long-ago all that trash would have been biological and thus degradable, and people saw it less as littering and more as returning trash to nature. Attitudes are changing but it's tough when the failure in civil society reaches to government, which can't exert the political will to collect the trash properly and find proper trash dumps. It's tough enough to keep your neighborhood clean, and you then find the neat little trash mountain you've made doesn't get picked up for weeks and is scattered about again by the wind. Did you hear about the trash crisis in Bandung a few years back? Mountains of trash in the street with nowhere to send it, because dumps were full and/or had been made inaccessible by landslides, and no one wants a new trash dump or incinerator to open in their backyard. In fact, it's just like what's going on in Naples, Italy right now. It's almost unbelievable! A first-world country and they have mountains of trash piling up in the streets because of a standoff between the government, the mob, and the people. It just goes to show that none of us are immune to government failure. We all suck at its teat and are only a few rickety steps away from chaos. Civilization is fragile."

Or at least that's what goes through my head. I've learned to dispense with the long-winded discussion unless the original comment was in the spirit of inquiry, not condemnation. For the rest, I usually just ask "so why are you here again?"

I have a profile on an online dating site. Oh, wait...

In seriousness? I'm pretty obsessed with thinking about sexuality (which is different than sex of course, though I'm decently obsessed with that as well...) I spend a lot of time thinking about power. I'm fascinated by gender. I hate the way the bisexual label fits onto my sexuality but we're usually (as in the case of OKC) only given three options.

I have a serious weakness for queer/bisexual guys and people with interesting interpretations of gender/sexuality in general.

I don't really believe in monogamy for myself... it doesn't suit me. In that vein, I am in a non-monogamous primary relationship that works so well and makes me so happy that I wonder what I did in a previous life to deserve it. If it becomes relevant (and/or you're a boy interested in some threeway action or a poly triad) I can point you towards his profile on here.

Okay, none of that is actually anything I keep very private. But I needed to put it somewhere and this box was empty.

The following are necessary and sufficient:
1. You're intelligent.
2. You have strong values - I don't mean in terms of religion, but rather values about how you go about living your life and how you hope to pursue your future. For me, my values center around trying to do a small fragment of good in the world through my career, and trying to improve myself as a person. I can value many different sets of values, but people who drift aimlessly through life without a sense of who they are and where they're going probably wouldn't mesh well with my personality.
3. One or more from the following list:
a. You're queer!
b. You have a dominant personality everywhere except for the bedroom.
c. You have a highly developed sense of personal style. And your jeans fit.

Extra credit:
You're willing to eat unidentifiable street food with me without ruining the atmosphere by fretting about all the different kinds of food poisoning you might pick up...

Unfortunately, I am that picky, and yes, there will be a quiz :-)