CURRENT MISSION

Promote myself and my ideas, write well more often, finish the PhD, take multimedia more seriously, and live a novel lifestyle with like minded others

ABOUT ME

NARCISSISM, EFFICIENCY, GUILT... concepts that motivate and define me. I'm a 30 year old stay at home dad with two little kids and a PhD on the back burner. We lived in Florida for a long time, but have settled in NC for Jillian's career. I've taken some long trips around the world, greatly subsidized by CS. I lean to the political left, but try to take in other points on the spectrum as to not exclude good reasoning... a radical centrist of sorts, I hope. I try to moderate my consumption of all substances, resources, and viewpoints. I'm usually working on half a dozen different projects at once and usually making very slow progress on all of them. I know a little about a whole lot of things, people, places, etc... and I like it that way.

PHILOSOPHY

The lives of privileged people like me are luxurious to a fault... the freedom to do almost whatever one wants presents the devilish predicament of virtually unlimited choice. In short, being a creative cosmopolitan may not be as easy as it seems, but I suspect rote work, routine, and bureaucracy wear folks down even faster. I think people like me should look for a series of tough projects and small groups of people who love working on them. Help improve the world where and whenever you can. Follow the golden rule and remember that we're all ultimately on the road to something, but it's probably not worth spend too much time worrying about exactly what right now. That is, unless perhaps you believe (as I still do) that you'll live forever.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I attended the CS collective in Montreal during the Summer of 2006. I wrote a comprehensive CS user survey and have been doing some statistical analysis on the data to try to better understand how people use this tool and how it uses them. I have also written a number of formal enhancement proposals to improve CS functionality. I went to Asia partly as a CS emissary this in the winter of 2006 and have recently been working to try to hook up CS with Idealist.org for a volunteer project. I evangelize wherever I roam.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

In the summer of 2000, pre-CS, I hitchhiked from Florida to Maine and back with a friend of mine, finding generous people willing to let us occupy couches in just about every urban center along the route (excluding Savannah, GA where we slept on a roof in an abandoned warehouse district). I discovered online accommodation sharing systems while traveling in Europe over the summer of 2003. Now, I use them whenever I want to go someplace new. You can see my journeys mapped out below or via Google if you look.

View Map

Interests

MANY Sports (hiking, rock climbing, surfing, kayaking, mountain biking, racquetball, tennis, golf)
Documentary Movies (I've seen hundreds)
Creative Journalism (NYT, BBC, NPR, Slate, This American Life, RadioLab, The Believer, N+1, etc.)
Manual Labor, Yoga, Meditation, Arguing

• books
• documentaries
• education
• yoga
• meditation
• movies
• traveling
• cycling
• hiking
• kayaking
• surfing
• sports
• rock climbing
• tennis
• racquetball
• golf
• teaching
• journalism
• science
• social science
• statistics
• volunteering

Music, Movies, and Books

I've been exposed so much media over my lifetime - half the time I don't know the names of the actors, songs, and authors... there are simply too many examples to list in an organized fashion, so forgive me for not indulging this topic.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

beautiful places on four continents, incomparable human kindness, needless suffering, squandered opportunities, trials and tribulations of all sorts. Perhaps best of all, when I was thirteen, I saw a man stick a rooster's head in his mouth on a dare - there was a lot of blood... his and the bird's.

Teach, Learn, Share

I consider myself to be a liberal artist with social science expertise. That means I dig creative and systematic analysis of human behavior. I would say that my specialties are organizations, consumption, subculture, social networking, environmentalism, and higher education. I can also do some fairly technical web stuff, statistics, and write pretty well, but unless the end result is an essay, they all tend to bore me pretty quickly.

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